ZOTAC GTX 680 Extreme Edition

ZOTAC seems to be creating a very powerful beast with their new GTX 680 Extreme Edition. News from other sources state that this card will have a factory over clock of 1.20 GHz, with memory remaining at 1.50 GHz. The factory voltage is also said to be 1.212V. ZOTAC stated that the card would be able to deliver core voltages of 1.5V to aid in extreme overclocking. A few weeks after release, you may begin to see extreme overclockers pushing the card to 2.00 GHz.

Aside from stronger VRMs on the card, there are also many other things added my ZOTAC such as voltage measurement points, extream-cooling optimized BIOS, and adequate-looking VRM cooling. There also is a mini USB type-B connector on the back of the card that apparently is not a connection to an OC (overclocking) module, but seems to be a USB connection to the motherboard. ZOTAC is routing the card's SMBUS to its Firestorm OC software over USB. Maybe they haven't figured out [how] this could be done through the NVIDIA driver interface, or they didn't trust NVIDIA. For example, NVIDIA blocks SMBUS access to components that they deem "sensitive".

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