Galaxy GeForce GTX 680 SOC White Edition Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,594 words · ~7 min read
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now we're finally seeing an influx of custom GTX 680s well okay I shouldn't
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say influx because there's just plain not nearly enough of them but uh we are
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finally seeing some custom GTX 680s so custom means Custom pcbs Custom coolers
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nonreference design cards so this is the Galaxy GeForce G GTX 680 s so so s so
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stands for presumably super overclocked
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okay comes with a three-year warranty 2 gigs of memory custom cooling a force a
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bracket and it has a pretty cool custom
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PCB but I'm not going to give that away until we get in a little bit further so
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let's have a look what they have to say for themselves maximize your performance with GPU boost so that is the GTX 68
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ability to dynamically adjust its clock according to the available power
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thresholds okay enjoy smoother game PL with adaptive vertical sync which either
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turns on vsync or turns it off to give you an FPS boost when you're below the
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refresh rate of your monitor and smoother gameplay when you're above the
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refresh rate of your monitor in terms of your FPS richer visual so you can
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surround yourself with multim monitor gaming on a single card so NVIDIA has
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added that to their repertoire against the red team which had a bit well they
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were the only ones doing it for the longest time I've even gotten like old 5870 iin 86 Edition in that system
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that uh could do six displays off a single card which was totally not that
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useful for gaming because it didn't have nearly the power to drive it take
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control with extreme tuner plus so that is their overclocking software very very
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cool all right do more with multi-display that was here okay uh
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Windows Demands a real GPU this much is true although I can't say it Demands a
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680 I think it'll be a while before Windows demands a 680 ultimate home
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theater with 108p Blu-ray and hdcp support if you game you need a Galaxy
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graphics card okay Galaxy turn it all on on okay well let's go ahead and have a
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look at the card because I think when you guys see the card you are going to
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get pretty excited about this so This GTX 680 is the cream of the cream for
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NVIDIA attention customers thank you thank you thank you for buying it and don't forget to register your
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card um it is their highest performing single GPU card probably their highest
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well okay their highest performing single GPU card and it is really really
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really really really fast all the latest features all that good stuff HDMI to DVI
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adapter uh mini
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what mini HDMI to HDMI adapter
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okay um two dual moax 28 pin power
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connectors okay I haven't actually like looked at this card that closely other
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than like what I think is cool about it so okay be sure to visit blah blah blah
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to get the latest extreme tuner this is great okay here's a disc But be sure to
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visit the website to download the latest thank you Galaxy uh you have done it
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correctly sir and madams because that is
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exactly how we roll here on Tech tips here's a CD download the latest oh yeah
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look at that custom white PCB which
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would go really well with a black and white themed system or in just any
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system um I tweeted a picture of this on
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my on my Twitter account of the Russian showing off one of these Galaxy Super
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overclocked Cards in a Vesta G2 system
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it looked absolutely balling out with the green lighting effects on the back
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of the card that looks so
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good just admiring it I wonder what this
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means it says Hall of Fame on the back of the card I mean I can understand this
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being Hall of Fame I mean just look at it but I don't know why they had to
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label it as such okay so on the back of the card we can see very clearly this is
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a custom PC it is very very very custom it is much longer than the standard GTX
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680 PCB it also has dual six P or 8 Pin
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power connectors so it is designed presumably with beefier vrm and you can
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even see that there's a lot more built onto the card um than the stock card it
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also has a much more substantial cooler so this is triple 92mm cooling fans on
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an impressive I mean this thing is really heavy this is a heavy card on an
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impressive copper with five Heat pipes and then aluminum fin array that goes
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the entire length of the card and then some so you can see here where all the
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heat pipes are running to this is a oh okay so this is a is this plastic or
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aluminum it's a plastic shroud but uh here we go so the GPU is right about
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there right in between these two fans these fans are covering almost the entire surface area of the card as well
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blowing down not only on the GPU and the memory itself but also on the other
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components so the memory is covered in a heat spreader you can see where these Heat are heading off too so a couple of
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them go pretty close and then the farthest out one carries heat over here
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then next farthest out one carries heat here and the furthest out one on this
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side carries heat right to the end there so if we look at the positioning of the
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heat pipes and the fans each fan is blowing down directly onto fins that are
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right near a heat pipe so we should have heat being directly delivered it's too
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bad they weren't able to put in one more heat pipe right here but I guess you can't really ask for too much in terms
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of outputs oh this is interesting Okay so we've got DisplayPort and three mini
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HDM ni that is a very strange output
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configuration I wonder why they did
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that um huh okay well I guess I'd probably
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opt for a DisplayPort out of the three just because mini HDMI is not uh not the
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best thing in the world for outputting at 120 HZ at 1080p for 3D
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so hold on just a minute guys well Galaxy does whatever they
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please when it comes to outputs it turns out I mean their MDT cards from the last
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generation were a great example of that where they were like oh NVIDIA says we
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can only do two displays at a time well we can do three ha um so there you go
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they've gone with DisplayPort and three mini HDMI connections um you've also got
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an open sort of second PCI bracket so
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what that means is this is very much an internal airflow card so you're going to
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exhaust a little bit out the back of the case but you better make sure you have a case with good air flow which I hope if
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you're buying a GTX you already had sort of figured out now of note is the fact
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that okay two things of note is the fact that you see how easy it is to access
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the screws that hold these fans on can you see that that's really cool take out
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three screws pop the fan off you can easily clean out your graphics card get
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all the dust out of it completely having removed the fans from it and I think
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that's a very cool feature and the second thing of note other than the fact
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that it has PCI Express 3.0 and two SLI
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fingers for up to three or four we configurations is the fact that this has
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the whitest PCB that I have yet seen I have seen products with white pcbs in
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the past such as sapphires pure motherboard back on the 690g chipset for
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AMD this is much whiter this is like
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white white as opposed to like yellow white so an example of a build that this
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would look absolutely fantastic in is one like this where the inner guts are
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predominantly black and white so I would love to replace the Radeon graphics card
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in here with a uh suitably White GeForce graphics card
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so check this out see white and black theme you go ahead
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you throw one of these in there how Beast would that look would barely even
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fit too even though this is an arc mey this is a long graphics card uh you know
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what I think I have a tape measure here yep let's measure how long it is because
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this must be close to 12 in all right so from the back of the
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there so 11 1/2 in so make sure you have a case that is capable of housing an 11
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1/2 in graphics card before you go ahead and install one of these so thank you
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for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Galaxy GeForce GTX 680 so
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