Hot on the trail of Sapphire’s announcement last week about a HD 7950 Mac Edition we see NVIDIA once again playing follow the leader and releasing information to one up the boys at AMD. Usually, NVIDIA plays a leading role in the hop and jump leap frog game of VGA technology, but the last year I feel we have seen NVIDIA just responding with whatever AMD comes up with and split seconds after AMD makes a release NVIDIA just does one a bit better. Now I am sure this pisses the living daylights out of AMD who is actually still struggling to maintain market share in the worst market in the industry as far as sheer balls to the wall competition.
NVIDIA in cahoots with their premiere partner EVGA have once again responded with a weapon to just beat the latest AMD candidate by just enough to say they now have the top spot in the After-Market Mac market by way of the new EVGA Mac Edition GeForce GTX 680. As far as single GPU technology goes the GTX 680 is one of the top contenders in the gaming world, which is still dominated by the Windows OS, but has now floated over to the Mac side of the table to work on their OS as well. This is going to be the perfect card for NVIDIA fans who have been stuck using and AMD card for the last few years unless they wanted to spend an extraordinary amount of cash to get an upgrade path from Apple directly at their store.
Once again we see the GTX 680 featuring 1536 CUDA cores with a base clock of 1006MHZ and Boost clock of 1058MHz along with 2GB GDDR5 memory running at 6008MHz. The card also has a of 256-Bit memory interface with a total effective bandwidth of 192.26GB/s. For the Mac you get all the same specific things that the PC version does with Open CL/ Open GL support and Boost, but it is unclear at this time whether the Mac version has support like Adaptive VSYNC, AA or others that are used to improve gaming, but since the card also works just fine in the PC Arena I don’t really see this as a setback due to that option. You will however notice that this card is based off the older PCI Express 2.0 standard, which offers fewer lanes than the 3.0 versions so the card will be compatible with older Mac Pro machines.
At the end of the day what we have here is a slightly slower version of the GTX 680 that beyond a slower PCIe bus has most of the exact same features as a normal card would have albeit it has the EFI to be able to be detected inside your Mac Pro system. This new card from EVGA will work in all types of systems, from any Windows XP- Windows 7 based PC to any 2008 or later Mac Pro that has a PCI2 2.0 slot and can also be used and recognized in Boot Camp. As far as the cards dimensions go the card will size in at 10- Inches by 4.3 inches by 1.5 inches in height the same size as the standard edition GTX 680 as well as having all the same rear I/O options including q single HDMI, a standard display port connection and dual-DVI connectors round out those options. The thing is though that an upgrade path for a Mac Pro has its limitations especially outside of the Apple store so this is a very viable product for that market as it opened options that were previously unavailable. Are you a Mac Pro user, or someone looking to build the ultimate Hackintosh system? If you are this new GTX 680 Mac Edition is a welcome breath of air in a very stale market. This is a relatively small market, but also one that has many fans and users in the Multimedia business looking for a quick painless upgrade and this fits that bill to the T. Thanks for reading Tech OF Tomorrow and we would love to hear your thoughts and opinions about this new card from the folks over at EVGA.
Source: Tech of Tomorrow
