EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Video Card Review

The EVGA GeForce GTX 680 (Cont’d)

The GeForce GTX 680 uses a cooler with a 63 mm radial fan, located beside the heatsink. The heatsink uses aluminum fins and a copper base.

Figure 4: Heatsink

Figure 5: Heatsink

In Figure 6, you can see the video card with its cooler removed. It uses a voltage regulator with four phases for the GPU and two phases for the memory chips. The voltage regulator circuit uses a digital design and is controlled by an RT8802A chip. All coils use ferrite cores and all capacitors are solid.

Figure 6: EVGA GeForce GTX 680

Figure 7: Main voltage regulator

The reviewed video card uses eight Hynix H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C GDDR5 chips, each one storing 2 Gbit of data, making the 2 GB of memory available on this video card. Each chip is connected to the GPU through a 32-bit lane, creating the 256-bit datapath that is available. These chips can run u
p to 6 GHz. On this video card, they are accessed at 6,008 MHz, which is already a tiny bit above their labeled clock rate. Of course, you can always try to push the memory clock above its specs.

Figure 8: Memory chips

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.