Gigabyte GTX 680 Super Over Clock 2GB Graphics Card Review

As we mentioned right back in the introduction, this card has had a lot of hype going around and lets be honest, we can see why. With its radical heatsink re-design and colossal size, there is naturally a high expectation that the card has to live up to – both on the front of putting any rumours to sleep about the inefficiency of the cooler and also the claim that it will be the most powerful single core [factory overclocked] card that we have ever seen. Without a doubt, we can say that the GTX 680 SOC has achieved its goals on both fronts.

We’ve seen Gigabyte’s Windforce based coolers show their worth previously and this new design has really paved a way forward showing that with the right engineering, cooler design can be altered without degrading the performance that is on offer. One of our initial concerns was that the fans had been arranged to push air though the cooler as is typically found on most cards, however this would mean hot air would be forced back up to the fans in a cycle that slowly heat the card up. What we find here is the fans have been reversed and also set at a slight angle that would point up in most cases, guiding warm air up and away from the card.. Also with the fans in this arrangement, the area that they cover to directly pull air into the heatsink is greatly increased and thus the effiency is maximised.

Moving onto the overlclock front, as we have seen, there is a great deal of headroom to be had in the card whilst maintaining very respectable temperatures and power ratings. What we did find though is that even at the overclock levels we acheived, only 3DMark 11 showed any real gain and in the real world gaming situations, performance was right on with the figures that we have seen with Gigabytes factory clock speeds. It appears that Gigabyte have found the optimum speed required on this card to give the best performance possible. Following on, by knocking the clocks back ever so slightly without losing any performance, we also find that the power required, albeit only slight, is lower and in the long run this means for a more efficient and cost effective operation.

By now, one would be wondering how much they have got to shell out for this beast of a card and at this moment, there is no talk about the price, but we will imagine that there will be a larger cost involved and we do also note that production of this card will be limited but to figures also not known at this time.

So where does this leave us? Without a doubt, Gigabyte’s GTX 680 Super Over Clock is the most powerful factory overclocked card that we have ever seen. Its thermal performance in our tests has put to rest the talks over the cooler design, keeping everything cool under the collar. We have also seen that, yes this is a monster of a card outweighing everything both physically and in our testing pushing itself to the top of the podium. Whether you should buy this or not is all down to the size of your wallet. If you want the best, then expect to pay the rest but we would certainly say that for now this is the best card that will be available on the market.

Shall we give this card an award? Well this is a no-brainer – of course it deserves our Extreme Performance award. Well done Gigabyte.