EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified Review: Pushing GTX 680 To Its Peak

Final Words

Wrapping things up, it’s hard not to find ourselves coming to two opinions on EVGA’s GeForce GTX 680 Classified.

Treated like any other GTX 680, out of the box the GTX 680 is a very impressive card. EVGA’s various touches such as 4GB of RAM, a larger cooler, a factory overclock, and of course additional VRM circuitry that leads to a higher stock power target, all serve to make the GTX 680 Classified a clearly better card than the reference GTX 680. Furthermore thanks in large part to EVGA’s binning there’s even more overclocking headroom to play with, leading us to reach a 1211MHz core clock without ever increasing its voltage. It’s a very good – if very expensive – GTX 680.

Of course the real draw with the GTX 680 Classified is with its overvolting support, and that’s where things don’t hold up quite as well. From an end-user perspective NVIDIA’s overvolting restrictions make the entire voltage manipulation process needlessly difficult. The fact that an external controller is required for voltage control and that it can’t easily be tied to overclocking settings is a considerable step back from what GTX 500 series cards could do. NVIDIA has purposely made overvolting more difficult, and while it’s not impossible it’s enough to give you pause as to whether the additional effort and the additional cost are worth it.

Bringing that into further consideration is that our overclocking results with overvolting weren’t all that great. With a reasonable voltage increase we picked up an additional 75MHz on the GPU clock and 100MHz on the memory clock, which compared to our initial overclock on stock voltage isn’t a particularly big improvement. While we hate to draw overclocking conclusions from a single sample, if our results are anywhere near accurate then it means EVGA is wringing out most of the potential of the GTX 680 in the factory, which is great for conservative overclocking, but it diminishes the value of having overvolting.

Ultimately there’s a sizable contingent of enthusiasts that will buy the GTX 680 Classified regardless of the above simply because it has overvolting support, and those enthusiasts will be perfectly happy with the card even with the restrictions NVIDIA has put in place. At the same time gamers who are simply looking for an ultra-premium GTX 680 will find that the GTX 680 Classified fills that role well. Otherwise if you’re on the fringe and are considering other cards (e.g. the GTX 680 FTW+), then this will probably come down to how you view its unique features. The GTX 680 Classified is without question an impressive card, but with a price tag of $659 (+$80 for EVBot) that may not be quite enough if you don’t value voltage control.