Physical Layout

Taking a look at the top of the card you have Zotac’s massive AMP! cooler which is known for being quiet and giving excellent temperatures.

Taking a look around to the back of the card we can see the exhaust holes and the display connectors. Due to the openness of the design, very little air is actually pushed out of the exhaust holes.

Two SLi fingers which support upto 2 way SLi.

The rear of the card doesn’t have a back plate which is unfortunate as it would have been nice to see on this high end card. Fortunately Zotac used normal Phillips head screws so removing the cooler and installing waterblocks is easier.  Zotac have also used a reference GTX680 layout so reference waterblocks will fit.

Removing the four main screws uncovers this, a wonderful matt black PCB with some nice looking heatsinks for the RAM and VRM.

The cooler is composed of two large fans, a large heatsink connected to some heatpipes and a Vapour chamber on top of them.

Here you can see the heatpipes are soldered on to the Vapour chamber. I’m not sure why they didn’t include that fifth heatpipe but most likely it’s because compared to previous generations, the 680 runs far cooler, thus requiring less extreme cooling, which also lowers the price.

Here’s proof it’s a vapour chamber, this is where the Vapour chamber is filled. It’s really great to see this technology used as it evenly spreads the heat over the heatpipes and the aluminium fins that it comes in contact with.

The two six pin power connectors for the card, it’s a strange layout that Nvidia has chosen to use and can make installing power cables kind of difficult. We also found the power connector to block some 3^rd party air coolers. On the upside we haven’t seen a high end Nvidia card not use a six plus an eight pin connector for a couple of generations so this is a nice surprise.

Finally we see what powers the GTX680, the GK104 GPU.