welcome to a very exciting unboxing the new single GPU graphics card King is
here this is the GeForce GTX 680 from
Galaxy it's got a three-year warranty 2 gigs of gddr5 memory at 6
GHz uh features direct X11 as have the
last couple of generations of GeForce graphics cards SLI fizx and 3D Vision
something that is not mentioned on the box though that it also supports is
NVIDIA surround in 3D Vision off of a
single card so uh NVIDIA has added that
functionality to their card you can hook up up to four displays in three gaming
plus one auxiliary and you can have 3D division
running at the same time off a single card so hold on let's see if there's
anything going on here ah yes key features NVIDIA GPU boost more on that
in a moment adaptive vertical syn is cool because what it allows you to do is
turn on NVIDIA's adaptive vertical SN so vsync as you guys may or may not know
will prevent tearing so that is those artifacts that look like you got half of
one frame and half of another frame sort of slightly offset as you turn in game
or or move around in game so vsync prevents that but also locks your frame
rate at 60 FPS and it can cause some uh
you know Mouse leg and stuff like that so adaptive vsync turns vsync on to
prevent tearing and then off when your frame rate is below
60 so what that means is that when you're below 60 what can happen a lot of
the time is you'll be locked into a frame rate that is a multiple of 60 like
30 or 20 or 15 instead of running at you
know 42 or 25 so you'll be able to
squeeze the most performance out of your card when it's not running at 60 FPS but
be locked at 60 when it is capable of it
in order to prevent tearing so that's kind of a neat feature man that was
really tight in there okay let's keep going here NVIDIA surround which I
mentioned already four concurrent displays including two dual link DVI
HDMI and DisplayPort 1.2 this card also
includes support for 4K displays so that
is super high resolution displays direct X11 with direct compute 5.0 fiz X yes
cool 3D Vision SLI Cuda PCI Express 3.0
this is the first PCI Express 3.0
graphics card from NVIDIA's
Partners it's suggesting a minimum of 550 W power supply but what you guys are
going to find out about this when I do my review on it which is probably going
to go up around the same time as this unboxing is that the power consumption
is actually phenomenal for a high-end
card so thank you for purchasing something something set up easy quick steps for quick installation guide and
whatnot okay cool and then we've got the
card itself so let's hold on let's see what galaxy includes in terms of
accessories and then we'll start talking about some of the additional technology
points that I want to cover about this graphics card here we go if I can figure
out how this comes apart ah very nice okay so we have a DVI to VGA
adapter we have two Molex to single PCIe
6 pin two Molex to single PCI six pin
that's funny guys high-end graphics card two six pin adapters we'll more on that
in a moment uh graphics card driver installation disc download the latest as
well as a user manual okay so fairly straightforward accessory package
here nice packaging overall though looks
good very black all right now the card
okay now in terms of its physical appearance it's a very similar looking
to a GTX 580 in terms of its size in
terms of the the cooler although there are some subtle differences but let's
have a look at the overall physical aspects of the card first so we've got two SLI connectors meaning this card
does support three-way or four-way SLI there's our little Galaxy sticker it's
got a green GeForce GTX thing going on unlike the GTX 590 it doesn't look like
it lights up or anything but it does look pretty sharp I'll give them that
this is cool check this out two six pin
PCIe connectors also what NVIDIA's done
by putting the two six pin PCIe connectors in the same place is they've
bought themselves some extra room on the PCB to do other things you can see
actually oh look at this looks like it'll be up to uh it'll
be up to oh that's bizarre it looks like either they changed their mind at some
point between having a six and an eight pin and then they did like two six pins
but then looks like you could either put them here and here or here and here
maybe it's up to the board Partners at some point in the future to decide how
they want to implement it but there you go this is the OEM One and NVIDIA says
that bought them some room for additional PCB components versus doing
it the other way it should also be fairly tidy to Cable manage this way because you can either come up in one
column or down in one column from a cable management hole so that's very
very cool we've got the usual NVIDIA blower style fan that we find on most
OEM cards with Galaxy's graph on the Shroud itself on the back of the
card we find not a whole lot we find the PCB is Right flush with the cooler this
is something that's very confusing to me about AMD cards and that is uh why AMD
insists on continuing to do this where they have the PCB ending here and then
they just have an additional like random bunch of plastic that makes the card
unnecessarily up to a centimeter longer than it actually is I ran into trouble
installing that 7970 into a shuttle xpc
barebone the other day because of that extra overhang there so NVIDIA does not
do that here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x
slot so that's capable of up to two times the bandwidth of a PCI Express 2.0
16x slot on the back we find a bunch of other components and whatnots so you can
see where the RAM chips are installed all on the other side there's no shroud
on the back of this card so you can see
the bare components you can see the GPU is right under there and then on the
back we find the io so there's our two dual link DVI uh this guy is a dvii this
is a DVI D so the difference is that this one supports analog output we've
got HDMI as well as DisplayPort 1.2 and
then we've got a little vent here and a bigger vent here and this is kind of cool check this out so you guys see how
far away the cooling fins are in there can you see that really um the actual
fins cooling the GPU I guess that's kind of tough isn't it okay I'll try and get
you guys a better angle okay can you see in there how they're angled they're
swept back like that yeah excellent okay so NVIDIA's done
that for a very specific reason it gives some Dead Space Between the actual fins
of the GPU heat sink and the Shroud at
the back so this is much like using a spacer on a radiator in order to
eliminate uh any kind of dead zones and as well as to more evenly push out the
air so so you give the air a little bit of room to to accumulate and then come
out evenly so I'm not describing this in the best possible terms honestly it's
late and I'm tired but but the point is that it you are able to exhaust air more
efficiently with less resistance from the see the the metal pieces in the
Shroud and it's generally better some of
the air is going to come out into your case so there's a gap here there's a gap
here but most of the exhaust from this blower design is going to go out the
back of the case so if you do have a case that doesn't have great ventilation
this is usually a better choice than going with uh the more typical
aftermarket designs that you see such as
uh ah these kinds of dual fan implementations that blow all the air
into the case all right moving on here
so what else what else we got here ah GPU boost so this card has 195 wat TDP
so that is thermal design power and what that means is that the clock speed
whenever you're designing a graphics card you want a particular thermal
envelope that you have to meet that the reason is a for power delivery you have
to make sure that it's going to be within spec and B for heat dissipation
so you can only dissipate so much heat with your reference cooler you don't
want the uh the actual GPU to start uh
producing more heat than you can dissipate because then you're going to run into trouble okay so what that means
is that when you design a graphics card you go okay I can apply this much voltage I can apply this much clock
speed and it stays within this TDP now NVIDIA took a bit of an Innovative
solution that uh may or may not have been inspired by something like Intel's
uh turbo boost and that is they allow
their GPU to turn its clock speed up in
less demanding games and applications to achieve overclocked
settings on its own so their GPU boost
technology is capable of taking the 1,06 MHz clock speed up to five
typically 5% or as much as 10% above
that stock clock speed as long as it stays within the thermal design
specification so that's one really cool feature GPU boost okay FXAA has been
added to the NVIDIA control panel so this is a faster form of anti-aliasing
and you can now force it on in games even the ones that don't support it so
that's a really neat thing as well we already talked about adaptive vsync txaa
modes 1 and two so NVIDIA claims and I'm going to be hopefully taking a look at
this in the future that mode one is about equivalent to a times AA with the
performance hit of only two times anti-aliasing and mode two provides
significantly better image quality than mode one with only the performance hit
of four times um multi- sampling anti-aliasing so the more traditional
kind so that's really neat as well we've covered 3.1 3+1 displays 4K monitors
support better physics performance uh nvnc so video encoding Hardware can run
faster than the Cuda based Solutions in the past and can also run concurrently
with the Cuda course on the graphics card so you can allow the Cuda course to
handle pre-processing while the nvnc so
nvn I guess that's short for encoder uh can handle the encoding the three heat
pipe dual slot fan I guess we can't really see that but the way this works
is instead of using a vapor chamber like we've seen with a couple previous uh
generation graphics cards from both sides uh which is just like a big long
kind of like a big Square very flat heat
pipe it uses three heat pipes one in an S shape and then two in C shapes coming
out from the GPU to keep things nice and flat to evenly distribute heat to the
aluminum fins inside finally it has 1,532 Kuda cores it
clocked at oh I mentioned this sort of briefly but it's clocked at just over 1
GHz stock speed although it'll boost up from there as well as 6 GHz on the
memory and finally another cool thing
about GPU boost is that it will actually scale with overclocking on the card so
you can overclock your stock speed and your GPU boost will actually scale up
from there as well and while I haven't tested it yet I'm really hoping to to
see some interesting overclocking results with this particular GPU so
NVIDIA claims two times the performance per watt of the two generations ago
Flagship GTX 480 meaning we've got significantly better performance at uh
what is apparently with based on the 195 wat TDP significantly better power
consumption so that means us SLI users out there are in for a treat because
your power bill is about to go down when you upgrade to a couple of these puppies
so I think that pretty much much covers it thank you for checking out my
unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 680 from Galaxy and don't forget to
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