Photos Part Two: The GPU
Nice looking, eh? Lots of heatsink, certainly far more heatsink than the GTX670 reference design’s solid copper block with aluminum fins. This looks like a top notch heatsink.
From the rear it becomes obvious that this GPU is using the reference GTX680 PCB rather than an entirely custom PCB or the reference GTX670 PCB. That’s fine with me as custom is expensive and the GTX670 reference PCB and cooler aren’t exactly fantastic.
Lots of connectors, that’s a DVI-I, a DVI-D, a HDMI and a DisplayPort. They all had caps at one point in time, now only the DisplayPort has one. Tragic.
From the top we can see a stiffening bracket (excellent!) the two normal PCIe power plugs rather than the (terrible) stacked design the GTX680 reference PCB usually uses.
Another couple views showing one of the non-stacked power connectors, as well as the end of the heatsink.
From the bottom we don’t see much, really.
From an angle we get a bit more, not much there to see though really.
Installation is standard stuff, nothing worth talking about. It’s not a short card, but it isn’t staggeringly long either.
Yes, that is tape holding my CPU fan on the heatsink. Yes there is black liquid electrical tape all over the poor motherboard. This is what happens when you get into extreme benchmarking, priorities shift a bit. The GPU looks nice though!
We’ll look at some parts in detail next.
