As you can tell, the PNY Enthusiast Edition is based off the original 2GB NVidia GTX 680 with its closed shroud blower fan cooler that mainly exhausts air out the back of your computer chassis. Now this design is helpful if you're doing in a enclosed case so you won't accumulate much heat from the GPU inside the case.
Now a quick look on the specifications:
CUDA Cores: 1536
Base Clock: 1006 MHz
Boost Clock: 1058 MHzMemory Clock: 6,000 MHz
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Bandwidth: 192.2
Support for:
3-Way SLIPCI-Express 3.0
Windows 7 and Windows 8
Open GL 4.2, 3D Vision, 3D Vision Surround, CUDA, PhysX, TXAA, Adaptive VSync, GPU Boost, FXAA
Card Specs:
Dimensions: 10 Inch by 4.4 Inch
Slots Taken: 2
Thermal Design Power: 195 Watts
Recommended PSU: 550 Watts.
Now this is a 10 Inch Card, it's not overly big or small by any means. In fact this card is actually smaller than any of my AMD Radeon 6970s I used in the past. And this slightly shorter profile makes cable routing more tidy. And also uses a LOT less power. The performance I can get for some reason is either trading blows or even sometimes winning to TWO RADEON 6970s, as evident in my BattleField 3 Video where I did overclock the GTX 680 slightly. Even if it loses to some games which I'll do in the future, at least the difference is not much and there's a lot less heat build up in my case, especially after I put another fan in my case facing the Blower of the GPU so it can take in more cool air to exhaust.
Test Rig:
Core i5 2500K 4.2 GHz
16 GB DDR3 RAM
CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus
ASUS P8P67 PRO Motherboard
PNY nVidia GeForce GTX 680
Razer Imperator 2012 BF3 Mouse
CM Storm Quickfire Rapid
The new Kepler Architecture places some interesting features to the table like adaptive VSync, FXAA and TXAA and PCI-E 3.0. This is nVidia's First card to incorporate the PCI-E Gen 3 interface that you can use on your new Ivy Bridge Motherboards but you can still use it with the older Gen 2 PCI-E interfaces like on a P67 like mine / Z68 Platform without any restrictions.
The VSync will be helpful when enabled as it will cap its FPS to the refresh rate of your monitor like say 60 and if your performance is below that it won't dip straight down to 30. Instead the FPS will remain fluid and the GPU will dynamically boost itself so it will get close to 60 as possible. If you're not playing those super graphics intense games like Borderlands 2, capping the FPS will not only conserve power, it'll ease the GPU so it will cool itself down so there's less heat, and saves a TONNE on power bill even though the Kepler Architecture proves to be a lot more power efficient than the earlier Fermi Architecture.
The previous Generation 80 card, the GTX 580 needs a 650 Watts of power. That is the now requirement of the DUAL GPU 690. And evidently, the GTX 680 needs just 2 six pin PCI-E Cables, rather than a 6 and 8 Pin, and you can get away with a 500W PSU even though it recommends a 550W PSU.
Games I'll be benchmarking soon after my Yong Siew Toh Auditions:
StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm
Crysis 3
Borderlands 2
Metro 2033.
All these reasons make it more compelling for me to replace Crossfired Radeon 6970s for just 1 GTX 680.
