Photos Part Three: A Closer Look

First up taking the heatsink off.

This is indeed the GTX680 reference PCB, however Gigabyte has populated the 5th GPU power phase, so it actually has more power on tap than the reference GTX680s. This is nice. The heatsink makes contact with all the RAM chips as well as the core, though the gaps between the heatpipe aren't ideal.

Let's look more closely at that.

That is a cooling issue. I think this is the original paste, but I don't know for sure nor dor I know whether the cooler has been removed before. Whatever the history, it left two bands across the die uncooled. Not good. I find it hard to believe that it would come from the factory like this, though the square edges on the thermal glop suggest it is the factory paste.

The die looks nicer cleaned up.

The MOSFETs have their own heatsink as we saw earlier, it's making good contact via thermal pad. 

Under that heatsink are, not surprisingly, the MOSFETs. Also the MOSFET drivers. Driving the MOSFETs is a Richtek brainbox on the far side, on a soldered-on daughterboard.

On the subject of MOSFETs, here are the memory power bits. Very similar setup to what the GTX580 had.

The memory itself is the same Hynix memory as the rest of the GTX6xx series.

Another angle of the "Triangle Cool" bits and a fan. The smoked clear fans are nice looking. I'm tempted to hack some LEDs into them, then they'd look fantastic.

How about some performance testing? Sounds like a good plan to me.

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