Nvidia GTX680 Analyses in Three Parts

[Wesley]

TECH: NVIDIA GTX680 ANALYSIS, PART ONE

NVIDIA GTX680 ANALYSIS, PART TWO: PERFORMANCE

NVIDIA GTX680 ANALYSIS PART THREE: OTHER TIDBITS

TL;DR: It rocks. Sell your momma if you have to.

[Wesley]

EVGA's GTX680 Classified takes more records and names

In a recent overclocking attempt by Vince “k|ngp|n” Lucido (some dude who I've never heard of) clocked up his GTX680 to a staggering 2Ghz for the core and 7.406Ghz for the super-speedy four gigabytes of DDR5 RAM on the card. The card was set with a scary 1.212v and achieved a 3DMark11 score of 16472. The overclock was helped by a Core i7-3960K, 16GB of G.Skill DDR3-2400 RAM, an EVGA X79 Classified motherboard and an EVGA NEX 1500w PSU. All the clocks were achieved under LN2 cooling for both the CPU and the GPU. If you're interested in the validity of the overclocks, here's Vince's HWBOT and 3DMark page with the official scores

Linky

[Wesley]

There's a Colourful GTX680 with a massive passive heatsink

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. On the one hand, its a GTX680 with the regular clocks and a full 3GB of DDR5 RAM. Colourful hopes to bring quiet performance to the high-end gamer with their iGame GTX680 Passive. Unfortunately none of you can buy an iGame yet because the unit is still in the prototype and marketability stage of the design process. But it does work and it will be available some time in the near future.

Linky

[Toxxyc]

^ I don't see this ending very well. Passive has never been a very good system when it comes to power-hungry beasts like the GTX680. Maybe I'm wrong, but still. Probably will be clocked at reference to avoid heat issues, and that 3GB GDDR5 is probably there to compensate for the slow memory clock it's going to sport. It doesn't even look all that, and with only 1 HDMI, one DVI-D and one DisplayPort...

Pass.

[Wesley]

It'll be reference clocked but Colourful has said that it can be overclocked without issue. Still, I'm also not a fan (he he) of passive mainstream cards, often they need lot of cooling to work well.

[Cranky]

depending on what case you have . YOu might get airflow. But i have a 580GTX wit ha accelro II cooler on it, it is prolly one of the best coolers you can get for a gpu and even lifitng my mhz by 50 and with my fan going at 60% my card clibed to 65 odd. On a reference that wouldv ebeen about 80 . I dont see how this desgn can stay anything under 85 , That for me is already too hot. Its like having a huge heater in the middle of your pc.