Point of View / TGT found a perfect formula for cooling overclocked GTX 680 (GK104 GPUs). There was no secret recipe – massive cooling did the trick.
If you look at the cooling performance, it will be clear why TGT chose it to cool the fastest GTX 680s. The cooler was more than up to the task throughout our tests. We overclocked the core by another 100MHz (205MHz higher than reference) and the memory by 225MHz (900MHz effectively), but the cooler hardly noticed.
The cooling does however have one shortcoming – it takes up three slots. While you may find enough room for SLI or three-way SLI in most rigs, you can just about forget about fitting a Quad SLI setup.
Games don’t seem to notice the doubled memory, but this does not mean that future games won’t benefit from it. The good news is that 4GB of memory didn’t negatively affect GPU overclocking.
The GTX 680 Ultra Charged 4GB graphics card uses low leakage chips handpicked by TGT, and the overclock to 1211MHz (Max Boost clock 1289MHz) confirmed it. Note that the GTX 680 Beast’s Base GPU clock went up to 1223MHz, and we wouldn’t expect anything less from the Ultra Charged cards, provided you’re willing to put some work into it.
The 4GB version goes for €60 more than the 2GB one, but this is not only due to more memory – PoV/TGT’s handpicked low leakage chips provide excellent auto overclocking and further overclocking headroom, making the GTX 680 Ultra Charged 4GB pack one serious punch.
