KFA2 GeForce GTX 680 LTD OC Pro Reviews

Spending up to £500 on a graphics card is a significant investment and manufacturers putting forward such extreme propositions need to ensure that they get everything right. KFA2 has shown in previous GeForce 600-series cards that is has the ability to create a well-rounded package, and the GeForce GTX 680 LTD OC is an impressive addition to the company's range. Shipping with one of the highest clocks we've seen on a GeForce GTX 680, this is a card that offers enough performance to deliver a high-quality gaming experience across multiple displays. Indeed, as we found in our benchmarks, it takes three full-HD displays and a combined 5,760x1,080 resolution to show what the card is truly capable of. The contrast of black-cooler-on-white-PCB makes the product visually striking, and the three 90mm fans aren't just for appearance's sake; they enable the LTD OC to run relatively cool and quiet under extreme load. But it isn't quite a home run, as creating the perfect factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 680 is proving to be a challenge for some of the biggest names in the industry. Gigabyte's WindForce OC proved to be a bit on the loud side, ASUS's DirectCU II TOP is big and bulky, and KFA2's made the unusual decision to omit dual-link DVI connectivity.

The KFA² Geforce GTX 680 LTD OC is one of the fastest GTX 680 cards available on the market. Thanks to its large GPU overclock out of the box, the card is 8% faster than the GTX 680 reference design and 5% faster than the recently released AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition. Compared to the last-generation dual-GPU GTX 590, the card provides similar performance - what an improvement with just a single graphics processor! It would have been nice to see an overclock on the memory too; the card can certainly take it as shown by our manual overclocking tests. Manual overclocking yielded an excellent 1240 MHz maximum GPU clock, which is higher than that of any other GTX 680 cards we have tested so far, almost 100 MHz higher than the GTX 680 reference design. Memory performance, on the other hand, did not do so well and reached a bit below what we have seen on other GTX 680 cards. Overall, the real-world performance improvement from manual overclocking is 10%, which is pretty good.