GeForce GTX 680 

To accomplish that with the Kepler-based GTX 680, and go on to seek performance-leadership is a very tough ask, and takes some very gritty engineering.

Its design goals are to raise performance and energy-efficiency over the previous generation "Fermi" architecture.

I tried running at various clock offsets to check what real-life performance boost they offer, because the clock offset is only a target value and actual clocks during gaming may differ, despite the selected clock offset.

By genre, TES: Skyrim is a role-playing game; it combines some of the best elements of older titles in the franchise, with some new sandbox elements to churn out an extremely engaging and addictive game.

During gaming, it is actually the quietest GTX 680 we ever tested so far.

It seems that, even though the game uploads more than 2 GB in textures, it doesn't use them all which is why there is no visible performance advantage.

NVIDIA's dynamic overclocking algorithm works well and provides a nice speed boost for the card.

Thanks to an overclock of 80 MHz out of the box, we see an about 5% performance increase over the NVIDIA reference design.

This implies that basic overclocking is more stable now, but once you go beyond the qualified clock range, stability testing is still required.

Diablo 3 set the record for the fastest-selling PC game, selling over 3.5 million copies on the first day of its release; it was also the most pre-ordered game on Amazon.

While the GTX 680 is indeed meant to beat its competitors’ flagship, it is supposed to do so by a significant amount in every game.

Also, if you plan to build a multi-monitor gaming rig, don't forget to buy some extra mini-HDMI adapters as only one is provided with the card - I had to wait 3 days for delivery before I could do our 5760x1080 testing.

This power configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.

Furmark maximum power is about 50W lower than on AMD's card, but this is due to different power limiting methods limiting the boards at different power levels.

Power consumption of the MSI GTX 680 Lightning is very similar to NVIDIA's reference design.