14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 Kepler-based graphics card was launched the other day, but there seems to be a little issue with the driver, although it is as much a software problem as it is a “feature” of a motherboard chipset.
It has come to the attention of people around the web that there is a certain new entry on the specifications page of the video card.
Basically, the video adapter does not support PCI Express Gen 3.0 on motherboards powered by the X79 chipset.
That means that owners of computers running LGA 2011 Core i7 central processing units have a reason to be disappointed.
“GeForce GTX 680 supports PCI Express 3.0. The Intel X79/SNB-E PCI Express 2.0 platform is only currently supported up to 5GT/s (PCIE 2.0) bus speeds even though some motherboard manufacturers have enabled higher 8GT/s speeds,” says the specifications page of GeForce GTX 680 on GeForce.com.
It seems that NVIDIA decided not to integrate Gen 3.0 support on X79/SNB-E systems at the very last moment, for some reason.
We hope that the Santa Clara, California-based company will make everything run properly with the upcoming version of the driver.
After all, it is already strange enough that the stable GeForce 301.10 release lacks this functionality even though pre-launch software and review drivers could run the board in Gen 3.0 mode on X79/SNB-E systems just fine.
There is one ray of sunshine in all this at least: the driver disk that ships along with the card, being that very pre-launch version, makes it work, so you might want to hold off on downloading the newer one until you know for sure if NVIDIA is going to do something about its drawback.
Alas, we can't give any assurance on this, but at least we know that “Ivy Bridge” machines won't share this shortcoming.