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Point of View/TGT GTX 680 4GB Ultra Charged reviewed

by on07 August 2012

Index

GTX 680 Ultra Charged 4GB graphics card uses large but efficient cooling. We’ve had the chance to see it in action on the GTX 680 Beast and GTX 680 Ultra Charged 2GB cards and although it did a good cooling job, what we liked the most was its silent operation. 

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Seeing as how the Ultra Charged 4GB and Ultra Charged 2GB only differ in memory, we expect the cooler to repeat its earlier feat.

The fans are enclosed in a plastic mask, which is easily removable if you want to clean them. The cooler has different fans - the central fan is a 9cm one while the other two are 8cm in diameter. Size isn’t the only difference as the propellers were designed differently as well.

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All three fans are connected via a single power connector, so Auto or manual RPM settings introduce changes on all three fans. The three fans make sure that every part of the heatsink is nice and cool.

The heatsink is split in two parts, with five heatpipes going through - two go towards the I/O panel, while three go in the opposite direction.

 

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Heatpipes start on in the pretty large copper base. The base is massive, partly because the cooler is held in place only with four screws, which again go through the base. The design is pretty tough and we didn’t hear/see any vibration due to the number of fans. PoV / TGT used foam-like pads in two places between the heatsink and PCB, in order to ensure a proper and stable fit with no vibration noise.

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PoV/TGT strapped the card with a heatspreader for memory and other low profile components on the front PCB. TGT’s backplate can be found in the back, although it doesn’t touch the memory so it’s questionable whether it improves cooling performance. However, it prevents the PCB from warping and definitely makes the card look better.

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The GTX 680 Ultra Charged comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The chips come from Hynix (model No: H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C) and are rated at 1500MHz (6000MHz GDDR5 effectively).

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Reference GTX 680 cards draw power via two 6-pin connectors. Factory overclocked GTX 680 Ultra Charged 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.

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GTX 680 Ultracharged 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.

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The card has two SLI connectors, which means Quad GPU is possible. Note however that being three slots wide, finding room for four GTX 680 Ultra Charged cards will be a challenge.


Last modified on 07 August 2012
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