 Welcome to a very exciting unboxing. The new single GPU graphics card king is here. This is the GeForce GTX 680 from Galaxy. It's got a 3 year warranty, 2 gigs of GDDR5 memory at 6 gigahertz. Features DirectX 11 as have the last couple of generations of GeForce graphics cards, SLI, PhysX and 3D vision. Something that is not mentioned on the box so that it also supports is Nvidia Surround in 3D vision off of a single card. So Nvidia has added that functionality to their card. You can hook up up to four displays in three gaming plus one auxiliary and you can have 3D vision running at the same time off a single card. So hold on let's see if there's anything going on here. Ah yes key features. Nvidia GPU boost more on that in a moment. Adaptive vertical sync is cool because what it allows you to do is turn on Nvidia's adaptive vertical sync so VSync as you guys may or may not know will prevent tearing so that is those artifacts that look like you got half of one frame and half of another frame sort of slightly offset as you turn in game or move around in game. So VSync prevents that but also locks your frame rate at 60 FPS and it can cause some you know mouse leg and stuff like that. So adaptive VSync turns VSync on to prevent tearing and then off when your frame rate is below 60. So what that means is that when you're below 60 what can happen a lot of the time is you'll be locked into a frame rate that is a multiple of 60 like 30 or 20 or 15 instead of running at you know 42 or 25 so you'll be able to squeeze the most performance out of your card when it's not running at 60 FPS but be locked at 60 when it is capable of it in order to prevent tearing so that's kind of neat feature. Man that was really tight in there. Okay let's keep going here. Nvidia surround which I mentioned already for concurrent displays including two dual-link DVI HD matte and DisplayPort 1.2. This card also includes support for 4k displays so that is super high resolution displays. DirectX 11 with DirectComput 5.0, Fizz X, yes cool, 3d vision, SLI, CUDA, PCI Express 3.0. This is the first PCI Express 3.0 graphics card from Nvidia's partners. It's suggesting a minimum of 550 watt power supply but what you guys are going to find out about this when I do my review on it which is probably going to go up around the same time as this unboxing is that the power consumption is actually phenomenal for a high-end card. So thank you for purchasing something set up easy quick steps for quick installation guide and whatnot. Okay cool and then we've got the card itself so let's hold on let's see what Galaxy includes in terms of accessories and then we'll start talking about some of the additional technology points that I want to cover about this graphics card. Here we go. If I can figure out how this comes apart. Ah very nice. Okay so we have a DVI to VGA adapter. We have 2 mole X to single PCIe 6-pin. 2 mole X to single PCIe 6-pin. That's funny guys. High-end graphics card. 2 6-pin adapters. We'll more on that in a moment. Graphics card driver installation. Just download the latest as well as a user manual. Okay so fairly straightforward accessory package here. Nice packaging overall though. Looks good. Very black. Alright now the card. Now in terms of its physical appearance it's a very similar looking to a GTX 580 in terms of its size in terms of the the cooler although there are some subtle differences but let's have a look at the overall physical aspects of the card first. So we've got two SLI connectors meaning this card does support three-way or four-way SLI. There's our little galaxy sticker. It's got a green GeForce GTX thing going on unlike the GTX 590. It doesn't look like it lights up or anything but it does look pretty sharp. I'll give them that. This is cool. Check this out. 2 6-pin PCIe connectors. Also what Nvidia has done by putting the two 6-pin PCIe connectors in the same place is they've bought themselves some extra room on the PCB to do other things. You can see actually. Oh look at this. Looks like it'll be up to it'll be up to. Oh that's bizarre. Looks like either they changed their mind at some point between having a 6 and an 8 pin and then they did like two 6 pins but then it looks like you could either put them here and here or here and here maybe it's up to the board partners at some point in the future to decide how they want to implement it but there you go. This is the OEM one and Nvidia says that bought them some room for additional PCB components versus doing it the other way. It should also be fairly tidy to cable manage this way because you can either come up in one column or down in one column from a cable management hole so that's very very cool. We've got the usual Nvidia blower style fan that we find on most OEM cards with Galaxy's graphics on the shroud itself. On the back of the card we find not a whole lot. We find the PCB is right flush with the cooler. This is something that's very confusing to me about AMD cards and that is why AMD insists on continuing to do this where they have the PCB ending here and then they just have an additional like random bunch of plastic that makes the card unnecessarily up to a centimeter longer than it actually is. I ran into trouble installing that 7970 into a shuttle XPC bare bones the other day because of that extra overhang there so Nvidia does not do that. Here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x slot so that's capable of up to two times the bandwidth of a PCI Express 2.0 16x slot. On the back we find a bunch of other components and what nots. You can see where the RAM chips are installed all on the other side. There's no shroud on the back of this card so you can see the bare components. You can see the GPU is right under there and then on the back we find the I.O. so there's our two dual link DVI's. This guy's a DVI. This is a DVI-D so the difference is that this one supports analog output. We've got HDMI as well as DisplayPort 1.2 and then we've got a little vent here and a bigger vent here and this is kind of cool. Check this out. So you guys see how far away the cooling fins are in there. Can you see that really? The actual fins cooling the GPU. I guess that's kind of tough isn't it? Okay I'll try and get you guys a better angle. Okay can you see in there how they're angled they're swept back like that? Yeah excellent. Okay so Nvidia has done that for a very specific reason. It gives some dead space between the actual fins of the GPU heatsink and the shroud at the back. So this is much like using a spacer on a radiator in order to eliminate any kind of dead zones and as well as to more evenly push out the air. So you give the air a little bit of room to accumulate and then come out evenly. So I'm not describing this in the best possible terms honestly it's late and I'm tired. But the point is that you are able to exhaust air more efficiently with less resistance from the see the the metal pieces in the shroud and it's generally better. Some of the air is going to come out into your case so there's a gap here there's a gap here but most of the exhaust from this blower design is going to go out the back of the case. So if you do have a case that doesn't have great ventilation this is usually a better choice than going with the more typical aftermarket designs that you see such as these kinds of dual fan implementations that blow all the air into the case. Alright moving on here so what else we got here? Ah GPU boost. So this card has a 195 watt TDP so that is thermal design power and what that means is that the clock speed whenever you're designing a graphics card you want a particular thermal envelope that you have to meet. The reason is A for power delivery you have to make sure that's going to be within spec and B for heat dissipation. So you can only dissipate so much heat with your reference cooler you don't want the the actual GPU to start producing more heat than you can dissipate because then you're going to run into trouble. Okay so what that means is that when you design a graphics card you go okay I can apply this much voltage I can apply this much clock speed and it stays within this TDP. Now Nvidia took a bit of an innovative solution that may or may not have been inspired by something like Intel's turbo boost and that is they allow their GPU to turn its clock speed up in less demanding games and applications to achieve overclocked settings on its own. So their GPU boost technology is capable of taking the 1006 megahertz clock speed up to five typically five percent or as much as ten percent above that stock clock speed as long as it stays within the thermal design specification. So that's one really cool feature. GPU boost okay FXAA has been added to the Nvidia control panel so this is a faster form of anti-aliasing and you can now force it on in games even the ones that don't support it so that's a really neat thing as well. We already talked about adaptive v-sync, TXAA modes 1 & 2 so Nvidia claims and I'm going to be hopefully taking a look at this in the future that mode 1 is about equivalent to 8 times AA with the performance hit of only 2 times anti-aliasing and mode 2 provides significantly better image quality than mode 1 with only the performance hit of 4 times multi sampling anti-aliasing so the more traditional kind so that's really neat as well. We've covered 3.1 3 plus 1 displays 4k monitors support better physics performance and NVENC so video encoding hardware can run faster than the CUDA based solutions in the past and can also run concurrently with the CUDA cores on the graphics card so you can allow the CUDA cores to handle pre-processing while the NVENC so NVENC and I guess that short for encoder can handle the encoding. The three heat pipe dual slot fan I guess we can't really see that but the way this works is instead of using a vapor chamber like we've seen with a couple previous generation graphics cards from both sides which is just like a big long kind of like a big square very flat heat pipe it uses three heat pipes one in an S shape and then two in C shapes coming out from the GPU to keep things nice and flat to evenly distribute heat to the aluminum fins inside finally it has 1532 CUDA cores is clocked at oh I mentioned this sort of briefly but it's clocked at just over 1 gigahertz at stock speed although it'll boost up from there as well as 6 gigahertz on the memory and finally another cool thing about GPU boost is that it will actually scale with overclocking on the card so you can overclock your stock speed and your GPU boost will actually scale up from there as well and while I haven't tested it yet I'm really hoping to see some interesting overclocking results with this particular GPU so Nvidia claims two times the performance per watt of the two generations ago flagship GTX 480 meaning we've got significantly better performance at what is apparently with based on the 195 watt TDP significantly better power consumption so that means you SLI users out there are in for a treat because your power bill is about to go down when you upgrade it to a couple of these puppies so I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 680 from Galaxy and don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos