Popular motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte is the latest company to debut a custom version of the NVIDIA GTX 680 reference graphics card. Gigabyte’s unique take on the GTX 680 starts off with a custom dark blue PCB and ripping out the puny two six pin PCI-E power connectors. They are then replaced with one eight pin and one six pin PCI-E power connector. Then, they top it off with a custom three fan cooler. The heatsink uses three copper heatpipes with direct contact with the GPU, and two arrays of aluminum fins.

The cooler and blue PCB via VR-Zone

The extra power provided by the eight pin PCI-E connector allows for potentially higher overclocks (depending on the particular chips), and the custom cooler keeps the overclocked card nice and cool. In fact, Gigabyte is shipping the card with a factory overclock. Although they did not overclock the 2 GB of GDDR5 memory from stock, they have set the base clock frequency and boost frequency at 1071 MHz and 1124 MHz boost respectively. Compared to the reference specs of 1006 MHz base and 1058 MHz boost, that amounts to a respectable 65 MHz base overclock and 66 MHz boost overclock out of the box. Further, depending on the chip, they may be capable of overclocking much higher.

The assembled card showing the video outputs via Guru3D

So long as you can find one in stock, the NVIDIA GTX 680 GPU is shaping up to be an interesting card, especially the custom versions! More photos of the previewed Gigabyte GTX 680 WindForce edition is available here and here.