Nvidia is fond of drawing parallels. With its prior-generation graphics cards, the company likened each model to a different role on a virtual battlefield. GeForce GTX 480 was the tank—big performance and, to a fault, a big price, big power, and big heat, as well. GeForce GTX 460 came to be referred to as the hunter, incorporating a better balance of speed, efficiency, and cost more apropos to gamers. Finally, GeForce GTS 450 was dubbed the sniper for its focus on enabling playable frame rates at 1680x1050, according to Nvidia.

As silly as that trio of categories seemed, they make it easier for us to put a finger on the pulse of GeForce GTX 680. Though its name (and price) suggests a successor to Nvidia’s current single-GPU flagship, this is decidedly the hunter—a gamer-oriented card that almost completely de-emphasizes the once-emphatic message of improving general-purpose compute performance. But hey, it does that whole gamer thing really well, just like the GeForce GTX 460

Every indication points to the GeForce GTX 680 beginning its life as a GK104-based embryo, destined to do its duty as Nvidia’s hunter-class card. With pointed strengths in gaming, compute performance was something it had to sacrifice, just like GeForce GTX 460. But fate dealt this chip a different hand when it proved competitive against AMD’s flagship in games. GK104 would not be following in GF104’s footsteps. Instead, it'd take the reigns from the GF110-derived tank, GeForce GTX 580. In principle, that's like Rosie taking over for Oprah. But rather than falling on its face, GK104 turns out to be a great follow-up.

The capacitor plague (also known as bad capacitors or "bad caps")[1][2] is a problem with a large number of premature failures of aluminum electrolytic capacitors with non-solid or liquid electrolyte of certain brands, especially from some Taiwanese manufacturers.[3] The first flawed capacitors were seen in 1999, but most of the affected capacitors failed in the early to mid 2000s. High failure rates occurred in various electronics equipment, particularly motherboards, video cards, compact fluorescent lamp ballasts, LCD monitors, and power supplies of personal computers. News of the failures (usually after a few years of use) forced many equipment manufacturers to repair the defects. The problem seems to be ongoing; faults were still being reported as of 2010.[4]

Nvidia is recycling aging Fermi chips and offers them in a new wrapper. The GeForce GT 520 has turned into the GT 620, but comes with just half the memory 512/1024 MB instead of 1024/2048 MB. However, the new card now supports OpenGL 4.2 and not just 4.1.

Also "new" is the GeForce 605, which replaces the 510 model. The card drops the graphics clock speed from 810 to 523 MHz and the processor clock speed from 1620 to 1026 MHz.