Add me to this list as well. SLI, watercooled and it's pretty bad. Disabled each card and tried them individually, and it happens with both, although it seems one is worse than the other.
 
Submitted a support ticket, hopefully it's not too painful to resolve.
 
 

bodine1231

My 680 does this as well. When playing a game (and keeping Precision open on my 2nd monitor) the game will freeze for a second and I'll notice the power spike,then if/when the game comes back my card is downclocked 50%,power is running at 50% and my frames are cut in half. Sometimes I will get a black screen and have to hard reboot or the screen will be frozen. I've tried running different drivers and stock settings but that didn't help. I'll try uninstalling Precision as some have said but I think it's RMA time.

I find the title screen for Sim City is great for testing this problem as for some reason it really stresses the card.

 
Did any of you that recieved replacement GTX 680 FTW cards recently from RMA get the power target surge corrected?
 
I am in the proccess of working out an RMA with Jacob because my GTX 680 FTW does the power target surge to usualy 275% and sometimes more followed by a black screen then returns to game running half speed running at stock settings randomly.
 
It happens very quickly when I attempt to do any GPU overclock which is upsetting as this card used to be a very nice over clocker now it has obviously degraded somehow.
 
I am realy worried this is a specific problem to this particular card as I see a couple of other threads throughout the net showing the same issue with the same card,here is one of them--> http://forums.evga.com/tm.aspx?m=1655226&mpage=1
 
I have requested bios updates and recieved two bios's for the FTW and would be glad to share them with other's with this card if they are having this issue to see if it helps them. I have bio's 80.04.28.00.80 and 80.04.47.00.83 if someone else has a different bios for there FTW I would Love to try it with my card before going through with another RMA as it is such a shame to have such a great card have this issue it realy makes me think it is a bios issue.
 
If anyone needs to try one of my bios's I'd be glad to help and if you have one that I don't have I would sure like to try it somewhere out there is a bios that came with the first batch of GTX 680 ftw card's that I cannot locate and it had the specs 1110hz base and 1176 boost I'd sure like to find this bios. Thanks for your time.

jrees

My cards were received at EVGA today. I'm in Canada, so it'll likely be next week before I get them back unfortunately. Will post an update when I get them back.

Thankyou for the reply. I ended up sending this card in for RMA. I should be getting my replacement soon to and will let you know how it goes as well.
EVGA sure has been great about handling this issue for me.

So, I contacted EVGA support regarding the problem with my replacements and get this reply:
 
"I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this matter has caused. Unfortunately the unit that was sent in for replacement passed testing there for another unit was pulled and fully tested for full functionality to insure you should not be running into the same problem. If the same issue persists with two completely different cards there might be a problem with the  system. At this point i would highly recommend testing the unit in another system or test another card in your system in order to verify the system is causing issues".
 
As I am pretty certain it's not a problem with my system as this thread suggests I did a bunch of testing and come up with this response to the EVGA support ticket:
 
Ok. I just finished 2 hours of extensive testing.

I used the above system (Asus RVE 3570k, EVGA GTX 680 FTW+ SLI, 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 1866, EVGA Nex 1500, WIN8x64) with the 314.07 Nvidia drivers. GPU settings were stock speeds. Nvidia control panel Power Management Mode was set to "Prefer Max Performance". Vsync is off. Here is how I did it.

Note, GPU1 is serial xxxxxxxxxxxxx278, GPU2 is xxxxxxxxxxxxx279

1. Ran the cards in SLI and started the Valley benchmark. 2 of the first 4 scenes resulted in GPU1 power usage spiking to 278%, while the GPU core drops to 324MHz. Started Crysis 3. The same problem.

2. Disabled slot 1, ran GPU2 in slot 3. Ran the Valley benchmark through several passes without a problem. Ran Crysis 3 without a problem for 20 minutes.

3. Disabled slot 3, enabled slot 1 and ran GPU1. Ran Valley, and experienced the same problem in 3 of the first 5 scenes.

4. Slot 1 enabled, slot 3 disabled as test #3. Switched the GPU power connectors of the 2 video cards to rule out PSU problems. Ran GPU1. The same performance drop as in tests 1 and 3.

5. Swapped video cards between slots 1 and 3. Slot 1 is enabled, 3 disabled. Ran GPU2 in slot 1 without a problem in Valley.

6. Disabled slot 1, enabled slot 3, ran GPU1 in Valley. Experienced the same problem in 4 of the first 6 scenes.

7. Removed GPU1 and installed in a EVGA x58 FTW3 motherboard. Intel I7 930, 12GB Memory, Windows 7x64, Corsair HX850 PSU. 314.07 drivers. Ran Valley and experienced same problem in 4 of the first 5 scenes.

8. Ran GPU2 in same without issue.

It is most definitely a bad card.
 
______________________________
 
Will keep you guys posted.

I am just now seeing this problem on my new build. It has only been online for around 2 weeks and just now getting to tweak the settings. Posted in other thread:
 
 I have a 680 SC Signature 2GB card and I was just doing some benching and noticed the spikes in power. I have the Power Target at 100% and GPU Offset at +72 and Mem Offset at +63. I have a fan profile to keep the temps below 60c.

The benching was running fine then bam, it spiked to 285% and of course that crashes the video driver. Didnt crash the PC and the Video driver recovers.

Is this some thing I need to have addressed by EVGA? I just updated the graphics driver to 314 but it was doing the same thing before the update. I was hoping the update would clear it up.
So here is another one to add to your findings. I hope to get in touch with EVGA and try to get this fixed. I am a LONG time EVGA customer and they always do the right thing, I know I will not be disappointed! 

Just an update. Received my card back from RMA and it runs fine. In the meantime I bought a third for TRI-SLI and all 3 work without issue. Yahoo!
 
To Brave:, have you run the Valley benchmark? I was able to replicate EVERY time without fail using it.

I had to RMA my card, and once  i got the RMA back it worked just fine. What was bad is i had to trade out a brand new card for a used RMA card (Wasnt to happy about that)
 
EVGA will take care of you thats for sure if it does need to be replaced!