ZOTAC GeForce GTX 680 Review

Performance 

Despite the card not having a vapor chamber, like the GTX 580, the GTX 680 is just as silent as its predecessor. Nvidia have used a normal aluminium  heatsink and copper heat pipes for the cooling, in order to keep costs down and it works like a charm. The card is whisper quiet on full load as well with the fan speed set to ‘Auto’. Temperatures are not too bad, either. The card idles at around 45 degrees Celsius and with FurMark running, it went to a maximum of 77 degrees Celsius. Not bad at all for a non-vapor chamber cooler. Since we barely had a day with this card, we couldn’t finish testing out the Adaptive V-Sync in time for this review, but we’ll surely be taking a closer look at it and hopefully, bring you a full analysis soon. 

3DMark 11

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer's 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the ‘Performance’ preset for this benchmark.

Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geomerics' Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the ‘Ultra High’ preset, Post AA – High, Blur – Full, Field of View  -  90, Level – ‘Fear no Evil’.