In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia Quadro K4200.

The GTX 680 has a 404 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro K4200. This results in the GTX 680 providing 63 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 680 has a 404 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro K4200 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 680 providing 12.9 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Quadro K4200 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 680, and so the Quadro K4200 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 680.

The Quadro K4200 and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 680 has 19.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Quadro K4200, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 680 is slightly better than the Quadro K4200.

The Quadro K4200 has 1344 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the Quadro K4200 is 949 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The GTX 680 having 857 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 680 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Quadro K4200.

The Quadro K4200 requires 108 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Quadro K4200 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 requires 87 Watts more than the Quadro K4200 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 680 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Quadro K4200.