Zotac customizes the GTX 680 with industrial design.
Historically most of Zotac’s ‘AMP! Edition’ graphics cards have just had a mild tweak with slightly overclocked speeds. Sure, some of them have had an improved heatsink, but it wasn’t until the GTX 580 AMP2! Edition released late last year that we saw some significant improvements in the design. Today I’ll be looking at the GTX 680 AMP! Edition, but instead of just having a mild overclock, we get a significant heatsink as well.
Let’s take it from the top, and have a look at the goodies packed inside with the GTX 680 AMP! Edition. First off, we have three Assassin’s Creed games: Assassin’s Creed Director’s Cut, Assassin’s Creed II Deluxe Edition and Assassin’s Creed Revelations. These games will not in the least push the GTX 680, but they do look gorgeous.
Next up there are two molex to 6-pin power cables and one DVI to VGA adapter. Sadly there’s no SLI bridge included.
Now let’s have a look at the card itself. The most obvious thing is the huge heatsink on top of the PCB, which looks strangely disproportioned. A closer look will reveal some rather interesting characteristics.
The actual aluminum fins block on top of the PCB is slightly thinner than the overall width of the board. Popping out of it are four rather long heatpipes that stretch out an inch over the width of the PCB. I guess Zotac engineers found this to be the easiest way to dissipate heat, unorthodox as it is.
Stretching out over the aluminum fins is a metal cover, on top of which are the two 80mm fans. This metal cover itself stretches beyond, making the GTX 680 AMP! Editon into a 3-slot card. The hexagonal cuts for the fan further add to the bizarre design.
In total the Zotac GTX 680 AMP! Edition measures in at 10.5×2.2×5 inches. The width, as I mentioned is due to the copper pipes rising well out of the heatsink. Default factory speeds are 1176MHz core clock and 3304MHz (6608MHz effective) memory clock speeds. Compared to reference Nvidia speeds of 1006MHz core and 3004MHz memory clock speeds, that’s an effective overclock of 14.5 % and 10% respectively.
So all in all this is a pretty big card with some serious cooling solution and factory speed; let’s see if it can perform just as impressively.
