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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and 670 round-up: which overclocked card is the one for you?

Happy first-quarter birthday, Kepler. Your reference design is old enough for companies like EVGA, MSI, ASUS, Zotac to push your various clock speeds to the limit, while using custom coolers to avoid meltdown. Arguably the time to upgrade is now and that's why Hot Hardware has done a full-on round-up review, comparing some of the best GTX 680 and GTX 670 packages against each other and against the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. If you prefer your morning news fresh and unspoilered, jump straight to the source link below. Or, if you just want the gist of it, click Read More.

Prepared to spend top dollar? Then the $539 ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP should be, er, top of your list, because Hot Hardware reckons its the "the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card on the market." It comes with the biggest overclocks, but like all the cards tested its power and noise were kept nicely in check. On the other hand, that card didn't win Editor's Choice. Instead, the badget went to Gigabyte's GTX 680 OC with a Windforce cooler ($524), along with MSI's GTX 670 Power Edition OC ($429). Of those two, the cheaper 670 card was reckoned to be better value, because it offered "90 percent of the performance" of a GTX 680 while only costing 80 percent as much -- and that, dear friends, takes us as close as we can get to an overall winner.