Point of View POV / TGT GeForce GTX 680 Ultra Charged Pro Reviews

GTX 680 4GB Beast definitely stands out as the best performer among the GTX 680 cards we’ve tested and its higher factory overclock translates to better performance out of the box. The Beast’s GPU ticks 131MHz higher than reference while the Ultra Charged’s GPU is 105MHz faster than reference. In our tests, the Beast outran the Ultra Charged by some 6 to 7 percent. Despite the quite high factory overclocks, both cards ran cooler than their reference counterpart. When the cards were under load, the Beast’s GPU was more than 30°C and the Ultra Charged by 10°C cooler than the reference card. This in itself is proof enough that the Ultra Charged’s cooler is excellent. Let’s talk about noise levels, or lack thereof. The water cooled Beast card will be as quiet as your cooling system is. We hooked it up to a triple fan radiator system and, expectedly, got an inaudible system. The Ultra Charged ‘s cooler was only slightly “louder” than our water cooling solution. With its three fans and huge heatsink, this is the quietest air cooler for GTX 680s we’ve had in our lab. Last but not the least is overclocking and you should know by now that TGT used Low Leakage Selection chips, which provide superior overclocking potential as well as additional headroom.

Point of View's GTX 680 TGT Ultra Charged is the first 4 GB GTX 680 that we reviewed. I was, naturally, curious to see what performance gains are possible with a doubled memory size. Unfortunately, all our data suggests that there are no significant improvements to be had. Using three full HD monitors at 5760x1080, we see only one game in our test group, Crysis 2, exceed 2 GB memory usage. Even in this test, the performance relative to a stock 2 GB GTX 680 is within the typical range we see from the overclock out of the box - which has nothing to do with memory. I further investigated and checked memory usage with three 30" monitors, for a combined resolution of 4800x2560. Here we see three benchmarks exceed 2.5 GB: Stalker COP, Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3. Not anywhere close to 4 GB! Running a single card at such a resolution makes no sense since framerates would be too low for any serious gaming. Given this evidence, I am convinced that there is no need to have more than 2 GB of graphics memory on a GTX 680 (or any other recent NVIDIA card). I also have serious doubts that any sane game developer would create a game in the near future that needs tons of graphics memory, effectively locking out 99.9% of their target audience (before you mention it, GTA 4 is just badly programmed).

Point of View / TGT launched its first overclocked GTX 680 and called it Ultra Charged (model TGT-680-A1-2-UC). The card brings several improvements compared to the reference GTX 680. We’ll start with what may be the most important detail for most users – special triple-fan cooling. In idle mode, the cooler is almost inaudible and it remains quiet under load as well. The only downside would be the fact that it takes up three slots, but the silence is worth it. Most overclocked GTX 680 cards get loud when the GPU is working hard, but not GTX 680 Ultra Charged. Another important thing that the Ultra Charged’s GPU runs at 1110MHz. Only a few GTX 680 cards boast GPU clock of over 1100MHz. In order to supply the card with enough power, TGT threw in a 6-pin and an 8-pin connectors and added another phase for the GPU. GPU comes overclocked but the memory runs at reference clocks. Although the memory isn’t difficult to overclock, we’d still rather see TGT do it, because the card would outpace almost all the GTX 680s around. GTX 680 Ultra Charged is currently listed some €90 higher than reference cards go for, here. This may be considered a bit steep and we believe that a price tag some €60 over the reference card sounds much more reasonable. If you’re looking for silent cooling, then this card is made for you. If you want an overclocked GTX 680, then again the answer is Ultra Charged. Furthermore, TGT made a sweet selection of chips, where only low leakage GPUs ended up on the Ultra Charged, where higher GPU boost clocks are a direct result.