Yesterday Nvidia officially unveiled its new high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX 680.

The GTX 680 is based on the TSMC-made 28nm Kepler GK104 GPU, and features 1536 CUDA cores. Those cores are organized into four separate graphics processing clusters, or GPCs, that feature shared L2 cache; a single raster each; and two streaming multi-processors that are now called SMXs.

The card has a TDP of just 195W, which is impressive, and a little surprising for a high-end card from Nvidia. The core is clocked at 1006MHz, and the default model comes packed with 1500MHz of 2GB GDDR5 memory.

So far reviews of the card have been very positive, and the broad consensus is that the card is simply faster than AMD’s HD 7970. On top of that, it adds new features and does it with relatively low power consumtion. Oh, and it’s also $50 cheaper than the HD 7970, so it looks as though Nvidia may have won this round.

We got in touch with some local retailers to get an idea of pricing.

Prophecy.co.za’s Paul Johnston could not give confirmation of final pricing, but he did suggest that the Inno3d model of the card looks set to come in at about R5,899. He was adamant that this price is not final, but he did comment that he expects the card to be a relatively good deal compared to the HD 7970.

Evetech.co.za’s Kamaran Sorathia was able to give final pricing on the Gainward GTX 680, which is already listed on the site for R5,999.

The HD 7970 currently retails for around R6600 upwards.

Sorathia said that the cards will become available from 2 April, 2012.