14 DAY TRIAL // Rumored for quite some time to be released at a $549 price point, Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce GTX 680 graphics card based on the company’s Kepler architecture is now said to be priced at $499 (about 375 EUR).
According to Fudzilla, Nvidia’s add-in board (AIB) partners have received the new price earlier this morning.
No reason for this alleged price cut was given, but this makes the GTX 680 a much better deal than before, especially considering the leaked benchmarks to show up so far, that place its performance over that of the AMD Radeon HD 7970.
Despite the new $499 price tag received by the company’s AIBs, the card’s official "Recommended Retail Price" or European price still hasn’t been provided by Nvidia, so things could still change in this regard.
The GK104 graphics core the GTX 680 is said to be based upon packs 1536 stream processors, and a 256-bit wide memory bus that is connected to 2GB of video buffer.
Nvidia has apparently clocked the 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. The GeForce GTX 680 is expected to be made official on March 22.