EVGA's GeForce GTX 680 Classified, Water Cooling Optional

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• Laststop311 - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  It is only worth getting this gpu if you are doing a water cooling build. It is the best set up gtx 680 for maximum water cooling effect and its 14 phase power and special voltage regulators really let you make lots and lots more heat pushing the clocks on this card to the upper echelon of gtx 680 clocks only attainable with its high quality water cooling set up.
  
  But for most of us, we dont like messing around with custom water loops that are open and have to be refilled and checked on regularly. Most of us the farthest we will go is a closed system cpu water cooler like the corsaire h100/h80/h70/h60 series'.
  
  For people not so inclined for a custom open water loop the best gtx 680 is of course the ASUS Direct CU II triple slot. Uses 5 direct heat transfer pure copper pipes that spreads the heat out to an incredibly large heatsink that requires triple slots instead of the normal dual all other cards do. With more square inches to spread the heat the faster it can dissipate heat meaning it can withstand a higher total thermal output power. Comes with guaranteed factory overclock of 1200Mhz the highest stock oc of all but the water cooled model.
  
  But not only is this the most powerful air cooled 680 it is also the quietest by a good 2-3dB margin. So if you are cooling on air alone don't let evga's classified hype get you all excited. Asus's direct cu II triple slot model will give you the fastest overclocks with the lowest temps as well as the quietest operation. Normally you can't have all 3 of those at the same time but asus pulled it off with the 680. Best air cooled 680 period.

• Laststop311 - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  and just so everyone knows this isnt brand bias I have an older system and i dont even use nvidia in it or asus or evga. I have an i7-980x X58 build 12GB triple channel ram and a gigabyte 1GB Radeon 5870. But it will be getting replaced by an asus direct cu II gtx 670 which you guessed it is the best 670 on the market and microscopically near identical equal in speed to a stock reference 680 for 70 dollars less (430 vs 500). It uses a full 680 pcb and not the shortened 670 pcb on reference design this is to make room for extra power phases and such a truly custom board design.

• maximumGPU - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  i'm also torn between getting a reference 670 to watercool later or getting the asus direct cu II as it seems to get you both performance with reduced noise.

• Johnny_Utah - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  The card hasn't been released yet (no clocks, no nothing) yet you know that this isn't the best air cooled card? Give me a break.

• RussianSensation - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  "For people not so inclined for a custom open water loop the best gtx 680 is of course the ASUS Direct CU II triple slot."
  
  Debatable.
  
  Galaxy KFA2 is better in every way. 2 slot vs. 3 slot, factory pre-overclock of 1267mhz guarantees out of the box GPU boost to 1300+mhz, something that's not guaranteed from the DCUII 680, unless you volt mod.
  
  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

• chrnochime - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  Eh either way you know it's limited by memory clocks as shown by several people who've done hard volt-mod on these cards. It's all moot when the memory cannot go much higher and thus the card is bandwidth starved.

• Grandal - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link

  number of their users want the -A(x) parts b/c of the lifetime warranty.
  
  I'm tired of video cards going tits-up after 3 years.
  
  I have 15 year old destop systems running Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, Win98SE with UTM software, etc. NONE of their video cards have failed.
  
  In fact before ATI and Nvidia hit the DirectX 9 years, I had never had a video card fail.
  
  I have Matrox Millenium cards that still run little linux file-servers.
  
  I have had 7-8 Nvidia and ATI cards fail since then. Ususally at about 3 years old.

• versesuvius - Saturday, June 9, 2012 - link

  The fan fails long before that. And most of the time your are out of luck for a replacement. Tells you something about the state of technology. Over a billion transistors attain zero value because of an 4 dollar fan, and there is no hope in sight. The only hope is 2 nm technology (:

• CeriseCogburn - Sunday, June 10, 2012 - link

  It finally occurred to me why the moaners about the lowest performance upgrade in a die shrink and a new gpu core in the last 10 years or ever made me so...
  
  A single 680, especially this one, is near or equivalent to the performance of 2x580, or the 590 for instance, so we have a doubling of the power...
  
  What the moaners and complainers did was take the FRAME RATE, and make a percentage of that the end all and be all...
  
  I see now their gigantic deception - it's amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes.