14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Nvidia hasn’t yet made the GeForce GTX 680 official, an US-based online retailer jumped the gun and added to its website an upcoming GK104 Kepler graphics card built by Asus, which is available for pre-order for $566.75 (roughly 430 EUR).
The card listed by Bottom Line Telecommunications uses the PCI Express 3.0 interface, has 2GB of GDDR5 video memory and carries the product number “GTX680-2GD5,” according to TechPowerUp.
No other details regarding the Asus GeForce GTX 680 specifications have been provided in the listing, but a previous report suggested that the GK104 core that would stand at the heart of the GTX 680 included 1536 CUDA and a 256-bit wide memory bus.
Nvidia has clocked the 2GB of VRAM at an impressive 1,500MHz (6GHz data rate), while the base GPU frequency is set at 1,006MHz.
As we previously revealed, Nvidia’s next-generation Kepler graphics core will also feature support for a new technology called Dynamic Clock Adjustment.
Apparently, this works similarly to Intel’s Turbo Boost technology to automatically increase the graphics core frequency to a maximum of 1058MHz, when the video card works below its rated TDP.
Speaking of TDP, the GTX 680 is expected to fit inside a 195 Watt thermal envelope and gets its power from two 6-pin PCI Express connectors that are stacked one on top of the other at the rear of the PCB.
As far as the video output configuration is concerned, the GTX 680 will come equipped with a pair of dual-link DVI ports, an HDMI port, as well as with a DisplayPort 1.2 connector.
Nvidia’s first GK104-based graphics cards are expected to arrive in late March (probably March 23). Initially, graphics card makers expect Nvidia to ship only limited numbers of GK104 chips, which means that widespread availability isn’t expected before Q2 2012.
