GIGABYTE GTX680 Windforce 3x OC Review

With all the hype surrounding the GTX670, GIGABYTE quietly unleash the GTX680 Windforce 3x OC edition. King of graphics cards or ultimate flop? Find out inside…

Product on Review: GV-N680OC-2GD
Manufacturer and Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £473.62inc. VAT (At time of review)

We’ve seen a few cards now with the Windforce cooler and each has impressed us with it’s cooling ability and acoustic reduction of reference designs. The 3x Windforce cooler on the GTX680 has been used before, notably on the AMD HD7950 where it performed extremely well so we are hoping for similar results with the GTX680 it is tasked with cooling this time around.

It is easy to forget about the GTX680 with all the furore surrounding the exceedingly good GTX670 but the fact remains the GTX680 is still the daddy where outright performance is concerned. That performance however comes at a price and it is the price that has seen the GTX670 take the limelight. It could however be argued that the HD7950 and GTX670 are mid/high end cards in their own right but are still the peasants fighting over scraps from their masters table.

In recent reviews we have seen the GTX680 trade blows with the HD7970 with various games and benchmarks running slightly better on one or the other. What we did see however is that the overclocked HD7970 was fastest throughout so today we will be looking to see how well a factory overclocked GTX680 runs in comparison.

Factory overclocked to 1071MHz (1137MHz GPU Boost) on the core, it is perhaps a little on the conservative side and with the memory running at stock clocks of 1502 (6004MHz effective) we expect that GIGABYTE have left plenty of overclocking headroom for us to have some fun with the graphics card as the Windforce cooler dictates that temperatures and therefore thermal throttling shouldn’t become too much of an issue which in-turn will allow the card to perform to it’s highest ability without being diluted due to temperatures.

Here’s what GIGABYTE had to say about their Windforce cooler:

GIGABYTE introduces WINDFORCE™, the latest cooling technology that differentiates the brand’s graphics cards from the rest. GIGABYTE understands that a fan is crucial to the graphics card, so only the fan with the most efficiency is selected for WINDFORCE™.

To qualify for WINDFORCE™, a cooling solution must be equipped with anti-turbulence inclined fans, ultra quiet PWM fan and pure copper heat pipe. Inclined fins help to reduce excessive heat and turbulence. Depending on its orientation, there are 4 types of inclined-fan designs: outward-inclined, 3D-inclined, parallel-inclined, and mirroring-inclined. Each type generates excellent exterior airflow for efficient heat dissipation from the interior GPU core.

Specification & Comparison

Firstly, comparing the GTX680 with it’s forbear, the GTX580 we see that there are some significant changes. Immediately identifiable are the amount of stream processors which have tripled. from 512 to 1536. The ROPs have however dropped 25% but to compensate the core and memory clockspeeds have been massively increased, with the GTX680 being the clocked slightly above the 1GHz mark and the GIGABYTE version clocked higher still at 1071MHz.

The battle everyone wants to see though is the GTX680 vs HD7970 and comparing the two cards against one another is a good place to start. On paper at least, the GTX680 appears to have the slight upper hand. Sacrificing a gigabyte of GDDR5 and running with the 256-bit interface, the GTX680 cannot hope to compete in total bandwidth available losing out to both the HD7970 and HD7950 by a fair margin despite having a much higher memory overclock. The tables are however turned when we study the texture fillrate where the GTX680 comes out on top.

One area where NVIDIA are shouting from the rooftops is the power consumption area. with a max power draw of 195W compared to 250W of the HD7970, the GTX680 should save a few more yards of the Brazillian rainforests (and of course cut your electricity bill) than the HD7970.

Price wise there is little to choose between them. The GTX680 is a little more expensive yet only because of the recent price drops of the HD7900 series. At launch, the HD7970 was significantly more expensive.

Overall, looking at the specifications you would be forgiven for thinking that Kepler is not the GPU everyone was hoping for. Sure it has faster clockspeeds but how does that transpire to performance when the core hardware (stream processor count, memory size) is not as impressive as AMD’s?

While the GTX680 did trade blows with the HD7970 in our comparison review, I concluded that ultimately, the GTX680 was the faster card. We have also reviewed factory overclocked HD7970’s which have stolen the performance crown back from NVIDIA but today’s sample could well see the crown being restored to it’s rightful owner, the GTX680…

Kepler Architecture

It was two years ago that we saw the introduction of NVIDIA’s Fermi, NVIDIA’s previous architectural change. The GF100 featured 512 stream processors in a 16×32 format built by TSMC in a 40nm process. Sporting OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 11, enthusiasts climbed over each other to get the latest and greatest GPU from NVIDIA. While the performance was there, power efficiency was very poor with the cards consuming lots of power and running very hot.

Enter the 5 series 8 months later and many would say the GTX580 was the card the GTX480 should have been. It was more powerful thanks to the fully unlocked memory controller (6x64bit), ran cooler and thus became a firm favourite among the high end GPU market.

For a little over a year the GTX580 enjoyed sitting atop of the GPU pile (save for dual GPU variants) and it wasn’t until the AMD HD7970 emerged in December 2011 that the GTX580 lost it’s performance crown. NVIDIA however had not been resting on their laurels…

GTX680 GPU
The successor to Fermi is codenamed Kepler. Listening to feedback of Fermi from gamers around the world, NVIDIA sought to create a graphics card that was not only the best money could buy in terms of performance but crucially it had to run cool and quiet to make for a power efficient model. Kepler addresses these issues in two ways, GPU Boost which we will discuss further in our overclocking section of the review and a redesigned streaming multiprocessor.

Kepler Core
The GTX680 is equipped with a GK104 core which NVIDIA claim is their highest and most power efficient GPU to date. Fabricated on the 28nm process, every component was designed with power efficiency in mind to ensure the GPU gave the best performance-per-watt possible.

While the 28nm manufacturing process holds the bulk of the power saving features, the way the new architecture works is also key to furthering Kepler’s power reduction. SMX, an evolution of the SM from Fermi is NVIDIA’s new streaming multiprocessor:

The SMX now runs at the graphics closk speed rather than 2x that speed as previously but because the GK104 has 1536 CUDA cores (8xSMX), over Fermi’s (GF110) 512 CUDA cores (16xSM), Kepler allows the GTX680 to operate at twice the performance per watt measurement compared to the GTX580.

The clock throughput of FMA2, SFU and texture operations have all been significantly increased and while some operations still retain the same speed as the GTX580, the GTX680’s much higher core clockspeed ensures a substantial increase for all GPU operations.

To feed the new SMX, each unit has four warp schedulers, each capable of firing off two instructions per warp, every clock. With a redesigned scheduling function, the GTX680 is a lot less complex and much more streamlined allowing the compiler to determine which instructions will be issued and can provide this information direct to the hardware block rather than going around the houses using Multi-port decode and a register scoreboard along with the dependency check before the information gets issued. This method is both quicker and more importantly, more power efficient.

Perhaps the biggest change to the processor core is the omission of the old Shader Clock. The shader clock was getting tired as it was part of the old Tesla architecture which was implemented as an area optimisation. Because of the way Kepler executes instructions at a much more streamlined manner and at a higher clock rate, fewer copies of the execution unit need be made.

Another improvement over Fermi with the introduction of SMX is the redesigned Polymorph engine (2.0). The Polymorph engine takes card of the tessellation workload of the GTX680. The design of the new Polymorph engine is to ensure that the tessellation we see on screen has little (as possible) impact on the rendering performance. What you may find bizarre though is that NVIDIA have cut the Polymorph engine count in half to 8 from Fermi’s 16 yet claim it is almost twice as quick. This is thanks to the improved core an memory clockpeed.

Overall then, it seems NVIDIA have outdone themselves. Higher clockspeeds on both core and memory, 3x the amount of stream processors yet streamlined by eliminating the shader clock to cut the amount of power consumption without compromising overall performance.

The story doesn’t end there though as there are a whole host of features the new GPU has to offer…

Features

RoHS Compliant
As a citizen of the global village, GIGABYTE exert ourselves to be a pioneer in environment care. Give the whole of Earth a promise that our products do not contain any of the restricted substances in concentrations and applications banned by the RoHS Directive, and are capable of being worked on at the higher temperatures required for lead free solder. One Earth and GIGABYTE Cares!

Ultra Durable VGA™
GPU Temperature 5%~10% down
Ultra Durable VGA board provides dramatic cooling effect on lowering both GPU and memory temperature by doubling the copper inner layer of PCB. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA can lower GPU temperature by 5% to 10%.
Overclocking Capability 10%~30% Up
Ultra Durable VGA board reduces voltage ripples in normal and transient state, thus effectively lowers noises and ensures higher overclocking capability. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA graphic accelerators improve overclocking capability by 10% to 30%.
Power Switching Loss 10%~30% Down
Ultra Durable VGA board allows more bandwidth for electron passage and reduces circuit impedance. The less circuit impedance, the more stable flow of current and can effectively improve power efficiency. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA can lower power switching loss by 10% to 30%.

“Triangle Cool” Technology
GIGABYTE introduces the latest exclusive “Triangle Cool” Technology to reach a better cooling performance. The latest patent pending technology combines fin with clip module in a special triangle shape. With the original anti-turbulence structure plus the new triangle cooling design, it enhances the efficiency of heat dissipation dramatically by minimizing the flow of turbulence between fans. Therefore, the “Triangle Cool” Technology provides a more efficient air flow for the cooling system.

DirectX 11
The first fully Microsoft DirectX® 11-compatible GPUs in their class, the ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series are designed to deliver unbelievable HD gaming performance for the latest games and DirectX® 11 applications so you can dominate the competition.

HDMI Support
MSI graphics cards offer the HDMI functionality to provide access to premium digital content. HDMI enables gaming enthusiasts to seamlessly connect to their LCD monitor to bring the ultimate multimedia experience. (Only 1 single HDMI cable is required while streaming audio/video data to flat-panel display devices, such as Plasma/LCD TVs, or projector.)

NVIDIA 3D Vision
NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ technology is a combination of Graphics Processor Units (GPU), specialized 3D glasses, software, and certified displays and projectors that deliver an immersive 3D experience on your PC or workstation. For a complete list of system requirements for NVIDIA 3D Vision Technology

NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround
NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround expands your field of view across three 3D monitors for Breathtaking panoramic gaming. At an ultra-wide resolution of 5760×1080, games like Battlefield Bad Company 2 have to be played to be believed.

CUDA
CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the GPU to speed up the most demanding tasks you can run on your PC.

SLI
NVIDIA SLI technology links multiple GeForce GPUs together for dramatically improved graphics performance. With over 1000 supported applications and used by over 94% of multi-GPU PCs on Steam, SLI is the technology of choice for gamers who demand the very best.

NVIDIA PureVideo
Blu-ray and HD DVD movies are bringing a new level of movie-viewing experience; with high-definition image quality far surpassing standard-definition DVDs. NVIDIA PureVideo™ HD2 technology provides unsurpassed Blu-ray and HD DVD movie picture quality.

Dual Link DVI
Dual-link DVI convertible output supports Video/Audio signal integration through DVI to HDMI interface, which drivers resolution of a digital display up to 1920×1200 or higher.

PhysiX
PhysX™ is designed specifically for hardware acceleration by powerful processors with hundreds of cores. Combined with the tremendous parallel processing capability of the GPU, PhysX™ will provide an exponential increase in physics processing power and will take gaming to a new level delivering rich, immersive physical gaming environments

First Look

Card Top

Save for the product code near the PCIe slot you would be hard pressed to decipher which card lay beneath the Windforce 3x cooler. The three smoked black fans are encased in a black plastic moulded shroud which looks fantastic and surprisingly robust despite the materials used.

Card Bottom

Flipping the card over we see the all too familiar Royal Blue power circuit board now synonymous with GIGABYTE graphics cards. Only the SOC version have black PCB’s which is a shame as many people would find the card more attractive were black employed across the range.

Voltage Regulation

Here we can see that GIGABYTE have elected to stick with NVIDIA’s method of the 5-phase controller on the exterior rather than interior of the card. The controller hails from Richtek with a product number of RT8802A and controls the VID of the GPU.

Card Profile

From the side of the card we see that GIGABYTE have employed a full length bracket save for blocking the power ports which serves to prevent the card from bowing under it’s own weight. We also get a hint of the massive heatsink which resides beneath the shroud that as you can see, does not fully encase the card and judging by the fin orientation, hot air will be exhausted from the sides of the card and not the rear.

I/O area

The I/O area is identical to reference designs having a HDMI port, twin DVI ports and a single DisplayPort.

SLI Configuration

The GTX680 Windforce 3x as with reference designs are capable of being used in a multi GPU environment thanks to dual SLI tabs.

Power Ports

Unlike the reference design, the GIGABYTE card has an 8+6 pin power port design hinting that this card will draw more power than a reference card. Hopefully, this will equate to better overclocking! GIGABYTE recommend a 550W power supply as a minimum and while our power consumption figures show that a high end PC setup consumes less than this, it is certainly prudent to buy a PSU of a quality design.

Overview

Overall then, if you can see past the blue PCB, the GIGABYTE Windforce 3x is a fantastic looking card. With three fans you would certainly be forgiven for thinking this card runs hot and loud however as you will see later in the review, this couldn’t be further from the truth even when some serious overclocks are applied…

Closer Look

Windforce 3x

As previously stated, the cooler shroud is moulded perfectly to house the fans.

Direct CU

The heatsink was a cinch to remove because only four screws were holding it to the card which defies belief given the weight of it! Regardless, you can see that the Windforce 3x cooler has a direct contact design with the heatpipes making direct contact with the core.

Heatpipes

The three copper heatpipes splay outward in a trident design across the aluminium finned heatsink array. These heatipipes are soldered to the heatsink for efficient transfer of heat.

Core Contact

There was perhaps an excessive amount of thermal interface material used on the core but as you can see it made near perfect contact and thus will not need replacing for quite some time.

Naked GTX680

The GIGABYTE GTX680 Windforce 3x has a near identical layout to the reference GTX680 design however there a few little extras the GIGABYTE card has. Most obvious is the power ports with the horizontal layout rather than the unusual vertical setup. You may also notice that there are 5 inductors where the reference design only carries four making this design a 5+2 phase setup.

Voltage Regulation

With the VRM heatsink removed we see that the 5 inductors are paired with 3 MOSFETs each. A further two sets are provided for the memory. Because this is an Ultra Durable design, Solid Capacitors and quality components are used throughout ensuring that this card is built to last the test of time.

HYNIX Memory

With a product code of H5GQ2H24MFA R0C we know that this memory is capable of some fantastic results and with it rated at 1.6v to run at 6Gbps, which is what it is set to, hopefully there will be some overclocking headroom to be had.

GTX680 Kepler GK104 Core

Finally we reach the GK104 core. We have already waxed lyrical about the technological advances made so we won’t be going into detail here again. I will however say that NVIDIA are no longer implementing the integrated heatspreader seen with previous generation, instead opting for the exposed core allowing the heatsink to make direct contact with the core to aid heat dissipation.

Let’s take a look at today’s test setup…

Test Setup

With the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X58 setup to the new X79 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to 4.5GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB of ram on board there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Some of the components for our test bench were kindly donated by CORSAIR who provided the majority of components without whom we would not have been able to bring you this review so a big thanks to them.

Graphics cards on test:
GIGABYTE GTX680 Windforce

GIGABYTE GTX680 Windforce OC

NVIDIA GTX670
HIS HD 7870 IceQ Turbo
MSI HD 7870 Twin Frozr III OC
GIGABYTE HD7850 OC WindForce x2
ZOTAC GTX680 2GB GDDR5
AMD HD7870 2GB GDDR5
Zotac GTX580 AMP2! 3GB GDDR5
XFX R7970 Black Edition 3GB GDDR5
XFX R7770 Black Edition ‘S’ 1GB GDDR5
AMD HD7750 1GB GDDR5
AMD HD7770 1GB GDDR5
HIS HD7970 3GB GDDR5
XFX DD Radeon R7950 3072MB GDDR5
PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD7950 3072MB GDDR5
AMD Radeon HD7950 3072MB GDDR5
AMD Radeon HD7970 3072MB GDDR5
ZOTAC GTX570 AMP! 1280MB GDDR5
NVIDIA GTX570 1280MB GDDR5
MSI GTX560Ti-448 Twin Frozr III 1280MB GDDR5
MSI GTX560Ti-384 Twin Frozr III 2GB GDDR5
AMD HD6990 4GB GDDR5

NOTE: For this review we will be using the very latest 301.33 drivers which is a change of driver from the 301.10 drivers used on the previous ZOTAC GTX680 review.

Motherboard: MSI X79 Big Bang X-Power II
CPU: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition @ 4.5GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 1866MHz 9-10-9-27
Power Supply – ANTEC High Current Pro 1200W
Hard Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB
Cooler – Corsair H100

Benchmarks
We have also updated our range of benchmarks to include the following games which will give the graphics cards a challenge and sort the wheat from the chaff. Each benchmark will be run at both stock and maximum overclock settings and utilise 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions along with AA at various levels (application dependent):

Battlefield 3
Crysis 2
Crysis Warhead
Metro 2033
Batman: Arkham City
Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
DiRT 3
Futuremark 3DMark 2011
Unigine: Heaven 2.5

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Overclocking (GPU Boost)

Overclocking via NVIDIA’s GPU Boost was covered in our ZOTAC GTX680 review so I won’t go into detail here on the attributes and pitfalls of using this method to overclock a GPU. Suffice to say though it is effective and as we shall see below, can be used to great effect..

The GIGABYTE graphics card comes with the core factory overclocked at a rather conservative clockspeed of 1071MHz. This will however boost up to around the 1137MHz mark depending on load conditions.

We were hoping to break the 1300MHz barrier and while this was achieved initially (above) and perfectly fine for most gaming environments we eventually began to hit instability when it was fully stressed so had to relax the clockspeed slightly. We finally settled for an overclock of 1267MHz which was 100% stable throughout our testing.

Temperature, Acoustics and Power Consumption

Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we do not use anything too technical, just a wall meter which measures the total system power draw minus the monitor.

Clearly the GTX680 is still a power hungry card however NVIDIA have massively reduced the power consumption when compared to the GTX580 by over 100W in typical gaming scenarios. Being perhaps the most powerful card on test it came as no surprise that the card was among the highest consumers.

Job done on power consumption – how about temperatures?

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we ran Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained.

Here is where the GIGABYTE card came into a league of it’s own. Despite being factory overclocked, the card never exceeded 65c during testing and better still, the card also performed extremely well with our manual overclocks applied. This ensured that the core and memory offset clocks we set are the ones that are actually used by the card. While other GTX680’s may appear to run at an overclocked speed, we have noticed that when the card reaches 70c it begins to throttle back the clockspeed to decrease temps. Because the 70c threshold was not reached, the GIGABYTE card enjoyed much higher performance which was as a result of the cooling performance rather than the higher clockspeed.

Acoustics
We’ve raved about the Windforce cooler for some time now and once again I am happy to report that it is a very quiet card. Not once could we hear it over the stock fans on the H100 (low speed). With the cards speed set manually at 50% it did become a murmur and higher than this was definitely noticeable but because during normal operation the fan speed rarely reached 50% it is safe to assume that you will struggle to hear it over case fans.

Let’s move on to our suite of benchmarks…

Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite™ 2, the next instalment of DICE’s cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and incredibly lifelike character animations. As bullets whiz by, walls crumble, and explosions throw you to the ground, the battlefield feels more alive and interactive than ever before. In Battlefield 3, players step into the role of the elite U.S. Marines where they will experience heart-pounding missions across diverse locations including Paris, Tehran and New York.

Average and minimum frames per second were measured using Fraps during the parking lot scene on Operation Sword Breaker. High and Ultra presets were loaded at both resolutions.

Crysis 2

Crytek took an internet beating from its loyal fans due to the fact that they pandered to the console masses and dumbed down the graphics to DirectX 9. Fortunately, fans of the PC version of Crysis managed to force Cryteks hand and they have since developed a DX11 patch and have also enhanced the textures with added tesselation. It is for this reason that we have decided to include it in our suite of benchmarks.

To test the cards we used the Crysis 2 benchmark courtesy of Adrenaline with both the 1.9 patch, DX11 update and Hi-res texture pack. Settings were manually placed to Ultra, DX11 and tessellation enabled with the Central Park map being run 3 times per resolution benchmark test.

Crysis Warhead

Following the success of Crysis, the stand alone expansion “Warhead” was hotly anticipated to bring more game play, more weapons, improved visuals whilst maintaining better performance, the latter being what gamers wanted most. After all how many people upgraded their rigs just to play this game… In the game, you play as the upbeat Brit Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes, chasing down a Korean nuclear warhead. Throw in some ice shooting aliens and we’re bound to have a great game. It sure delivered.

Testing was done using Framebuffer’s Crysis Warhead benchmarking tool. The tests were configured to DirectX 10 at Enthusiast levels. Each test on the Ambush map was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City builds upon the intense, atmospheric foundation of Batman: Arkham Asylum, sending players soaring into Arkham City, the new maximum security “home” for all of Gotham City’s thugs, gangsters and insane criminal masterminds. Set inside the heavily fortified walls of a sprawling district in the heart of Gotham City, this highly anticipated sequel introduces a brand-new story that draws together a new all-star cast of classic characters and murderous villains from the Batman universe, as well as a vast range of new and enhanced gameplay features to deliver the ultimate experience as the Dark Knight.

The results below were obtained from the builtin benchmark utility from the game. All the settings were set to

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

Skyrim is not a direct successor to the very popular Oblivion. Instead it takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion. The non-linear playing that made the Elder Scrolls such a popular series does however make a return along with the beautiful scenery the encompasses the world of Skyrim.

Average and minimum frames per second were measured using Fraps during the drop down passage to Riverwood. V-sync was disabled to allow fluctuating (higher the 60) FPS for these runs. It is however recommended that v-sync is left enabled during normal gameplay due to the games dynamics.

DiRT 3

As players race to elevate their global standing, DiRT 3 is back delivering mud, sweat and gears world over: from the intense weather-beaten rally stages of Europe, Africa and the US, to executing performance driving showcases and career challenges where car control is pushed to spectacular limits.

The in-game benchmarking tool was used to test performance. All the display settings were set to the maximum available and DirectX 11 was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Metro 2033

Based on the novel by the same name, Metro 2033 is a first person shooter with elements of survival horror. As Artyom, you trawl through the mutant infested metro systems of post-apocalyptic Moscow. The game delivers presents a grim ambience that reflects on the overall atmosphere of the underground setting. Metro 2033 uses the setting as a back drop to showcase some of the best visuals of any games out now, making it the ideal benchmark for those looking for the best graphics card.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Metro 2033, configuring the settings to High and making use of DirectX 11. The frontline scene was looped 3 times for each configuration. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Futuremark: 3DMark 2011

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world’s most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. The benchmark was run in both Performance and Extreme presets.

Unigine: Heaven 2.5

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Conclusion

The GIGABYTE GTX680 Windforce 3x is an excellent graphics card which is sure to be held in very high regard on many enthusiast forums. It runs very cool, very quiet (under normal use) and perhaps most importantly it is very fast. Surveying our benchmarks results it is clearly one of the fastest cards we have tested here at Vortez,even faster than our previous best, the overclocked HD7970 Black Edition from XFX. Performance then the card has everything sewn up and therefore cannot be faulted.

It would be easy to dismiss the card as being the ultimate offering and for the most part it truly it. It has everything going for it performance wise and from certain angles also looks the part too, all except one area, the PCB colour.

The electric blue PCB may be appealing to some people, especially those who have a blue theme going on in their case but many I’m sure, would prefer to see a card such as this with a black PCB. As mentioned earlier, black is the reserve of SOC (Super Overclock) editions to assist in distinguishing between a normal or overclocked editions such as we have reviewed today and the flagship SOC card. For me they have this the wrong way around. The ‘normal’ cards are for the masses, the SOC cards should be the ones which have the blue PCBs – or better still have all the cards with black PCB’s. You may think this is just a minor point and aesthetics aside I would be inclined to agree were it not for the second issue I take with the GIGABYTE GTX680 Windforce x3 – the price.

At £473 it cannot be described as a bargain. This is over £50 more expensive than a reference based card and while this card comes factory overclocked and has a (very good) custom cooler, £50 is a lot to pay for the privilege. At this price people expect the card to be perfect. Sadly due to the colour of the PCB, I would not agree on this point. When you also consider this card has ‘just’ 2GB with the HD7970 having 50% more and the 4GB GTX680 having double the amount, the card is certainly an expensive proposition to make. It’s one saving grace in this area is that the price is in-line with other manufacturers custom cooled examples and thus it could be argued that it is competitive.

Price and PCB colour choice aside, the graphics card and specifically the Windforce cooler is a fantastic looking piece of kit which matches those looks with some very good physical attributes, attributes which then carry through to the graphics cards excellent performance. This performance on a whole is unrivalled and thus the product we have reviewed today is worthy of nothing less than our Gold award.

Pros:
+ Very Fast
+ Very Cool
+ Very Quiet
+ Very Good Overclocker

Cons:
– Very Expensive
– Very Blue