Coolers

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 Overclock Edition

The GPU and memory cooler has two nickel-plated heatsinks interconnected by heatpipes and a copper base. The power transistors have their own small heatsink. Over it all is a plastic cover with three fans. As a result, the graphic card occupies two slots, but in spite of being rather large, produces almost no noise.

Palit GeForce GTX 680 JetStream

Palit doesn't use vapor chambers, so the cooling system consists of three elements only: the massive main heatsink with lengthwise ribs and heatpipes, the cover with three fans, and the secondary heatsink plate for the memory chips and power transistors. One drawback of this cooling system is that densely packed ribs greatly increase fan noise even at low speeds.

Temperature monitoring results

We measured temperatures using the EVGA PrecisionX utility.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 Overclock Edition

Palit GeForce GTX 680 JetStream

In both cases, the maximum temperature doesn't exceed 81°C, which is a very good result for a top-level product. The Palit's cooling system is noisier and less efficient.

The maximum GPU clock rate and maximum temperature marks on the graphs show that the clock rate is handled by the driver and can hardly be managed by the user.

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