Gigabyte GTX 680 Super Over Clock 2GB Graphics Card Review

This particular look on the card is one of those that has been circulating the net for a while now and its no wonder why, the card is probably one of the largest that we have ever looked at. The vast bulk of the SOC is made up of heatsink with a black metal plate over the side where we would traditionally see a number of fans that would draw air in and through the card, then out the back and away from the system.

As we can see, Gigabyte have taken a radical approach to their cooling design and so we find five small 40mm fans running down the top of the card that pull air up and through the heatsink.

Looking at the bottom of the card, we can see the huge heatsink that is laid on top of the GPU core and memory to keep everything cool in its overclocked state. To the bottom left of the PCB we can see the Xtreme OC profile button which gives the card even more of a boost and stability when overclocking it more in extreme conditions.

Looking back at the side of the card we can see there is a degree of space between the heatpipes and backplate and this is partly to allow warm air to flow from the heatpipes, but also allows air to flow around the card more naturally improving its performance.

As we would expect, this card requires a fair amount of power and so we find two 8 pin PCI-e power connections on the end of the card.

For anyone who wants to take the performance to the hyper level, we find two SLI terminals on the top of the card for multi-GPU setups.

Moving round to the display outputs, we find single link and dual link DVI outputs, HDMI and a full size display port. Like all 600 series NVidia cards the GTX 680 SOC supports full 3 screen Vision Surround with a fourth satellite monitor during gaming. Above the display outputs we find the SOC branding as part of the grill that allows hot air to pass out of the back of the card.

Last of all is one of the key parts that makes up this cards statement; its factory overclock speeds. As we know, the GTX 680’s default clocks are 1006MHz on the core with boost speed upto 1058MHz and 1500MHz (6000MHz effective) on the memory. Gigabyte have taken things to a whole new level with the SOC, ramping the core clock right upto 1137MHz, boosting at 1202MHz, whilst bringing the memory speed up to 1150MHz (6200MHz effective).