Published in Reviews

Point of View/TGT GTX 680 Beast reviewed

by on11 July 2012

Index

The GTX 680 Beast and GTX 680 UltraCharged use the same cooling. We tested the GTX 680 UltraCharged earlier and we know the cooler packs a mean punch. The UltraCharged’s GPU is factory overclocked by 104MHz, whereas the Beast has a 157MHz overclock. Despite the high Beast’s overclock, the GPU’ temperature is only slightly higher than on the UltraCharged. In both cases, thermals are better than on the reference card.

The cooler’s exceptional performance is not a fluke, since it’s a triple slot cooler with three fans. We’ve already seen a few non –reference coolers for GTX 680 and they were wider than two slots, or taller than the reference design, so we weren’t surprised by PoV/TGT’s decision.

beast-front

The central fan is a 9cm one while the other two are 8cm. Size isn’t the only difference as the propellers were designed differently.

IMG 7039
The fans are enclosed in a plastic mask, which is easily removable if you want to clean the fans. The heatsink is the widest in the middle, so the central fan is larger than the side ones.

Uc-cooler-1

The heatsink has five heatpipes – tree goes towards the end and two towards the I/O panel.

IMG 7130

UC-heatsink-2

The cooler is fixed on the PCB with four screws, which go through the cooler base. The design is pretty tough and we didn’t hear/see any vibration due to the three fans.

cooler-base-1

On top of the cooler, see below, is a metal plate which would’ve been perfect for a logo, but it was left empty. It seems to us that the plate is there simply to cover the spot where heatsink splits.

IMG 7129 

cooler-base-2

PoV/TGT strapped the card with a heatspreader for the memory and other low profile components on the PCB.

heatspreader

GTX 680 Beast comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The chips come from Hynix (model No: H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C) and are rated at 1500MHz (6000MHz GDDR5 effectively).

Reference GTX 680 cards draw power via two 6-pin connectors. Factory overclocked GTX 680 Beast / UltraCharged has one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector. Point of View / TGT uses five phase PWM design, one phase more than on the reference card.

 

beast-power

GTX 680 Beast comes with two dual-link DVI outs, but only one is analog VGA-out capable. The VGA-out requires using the bottom DVI – the one in line with HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. Nvidia made sure not to lag behind the competition so Kepler based cards can run up to four displays simultaneously.

beast-video

The card has two SLI connectors, which means Quad GPU is possible.

A metal plate was mounted on the back of the card. We must admit that it really does make it look better but it’s questionable whether it affects cooling performance.

beast-back-with-box


Last modified on 12 July 2012
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