Palit GeForce GTX 680 JetStream review - Introduction

Introduction

Recently NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 680, their all new flagship graphics card. Meanwhile we have shown you the reference review, 2-way, heck even 3-way SLI articles and an overclocking tweaking guide just on this one product.

It's now April though and NVIDIA's partners have had some time to tailor the cards, that's right customize them. Today that honor goes to Palit, which has a new and rather sizable card armed with one spicy Kepler chip out in the stores.

Kepler my friends is the codename for the architecture behind the GeForce series 600 graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 680 2 GB is now a fact and selling in the stores as we speak. The all new product has some interesting new features which we'll happily discuss with you -- obviously the GeForce GTX 680 is positioned against AMD's Radeon HD 7970 so we'll pit them against each other.

So customized GeForce GTX 680 cards are already being released. Palit has a special offering for you to purchase as well, a JetStream edition graphics card. Basically they developed the PCB and started fine-tuning it compared to the reference design.

The end result is an impressive looking beast, the customized GTX 680 has a big three fan cooler attached to it. And it's not just three fans, it's also three slots wide -- eating away a good chunk of space inside the chassis.

The benefits of that big cooler are plentiful though, this is a card you will not hear whilst retaining really good temperatures, yeah it works pretty darn well in both performance and silence.

The card's base clock frequency is set higher at default for you, at 1084 MHz with a dynamic turbo that clocks up-to 1150 MHz. And then the memory it runs at 6300 MHz meaning that both the GPU core and thus memory have been factory overclocked for you.

Obviously with such cooling we'll up that a notch in an overclocking session but have a quick peek at the product after which we'll dive into the GPU architecture, photo shoot and benchmarks. Next page please.