Gigabyte GTX 680 Super Over Clock 2GB Graphics Card Review

With this card having such a monster of a cooler, it’s worth taking a look at what makes it up in a little more depth.

Starting from the bottom and working up we have the back plate which serves two functions. First of all it acts as a heat shield for the back of the cards PCB, but more importantly it helps to support the card from bending with the large weight of the cooler that hangs under the PCB when mounted in the vast majority of cases.

Next up in the layers, naturally we find the card itself with the GPU core at its heart and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory positioned around it. To the right we find the Mosfets and caps which deliver the power needed to the board.

Now we move onto the huge heatsink. Mounted to one side we have the five 40mm fans as noted on the previous page, which pull air through the heatsink. On top of the heatsink is another supporting bar onto which the cover mounts. As you would expect, this card is pretty heavy and out of the cards total weight of 1.64kg, the heatsink as shown above accounts for 70% of the cards weight at 1.15kg. Hence the need for the support plate on the back of the PCB.

Flipping the heatsink over we find a large copper vapour chamber which covers the majority of the card to give the most effective cooling possible.

Looking a little closer we can see four of the five heatpipes that run from the vapour chamber and through the heatsink to move heat away to the aluminium heastink.