Introduction

It's been ages since we've seen anything from Palit and really it's for good reason. Let's be honest, up until now, it's been a quiet succession of months for NVIDIA when it comes to the video card market and that means for NVIDIA GPU only partners, it's been very quiet for them.

We should start to see that all change over the coming months, not only because we have the new GTX 680, but we'll see NVIDIA fill out the GTX 600 series line over the next few months while we then see their partners offer us fancy new variants of the model. Next up we'll see the GTX 670 in May of course followed by the GTX 660, 650 and low-end models.

Speaking of fancy new variants, though, we didn't expect to see one this close to launch. Palit has just released their own GTX 680 which falls under the brand new JetStream series. We knew that Palit would come to the party quickly with a fancy new variant, but we can honestly say we didn't think it would be this quickly with the model only officially launching last week.

What was so great about the new card, though, is we really get a chance to flex our location muscle these days. As the cards just arrived into the Palit HQ in Taiwan and moved up from R&D, we got a phone call telling us that we could come in and pick it up the same day, well ahead of any other media.

No more do we have to wait for courier companies or worry about Mother Nature messing with our card in transit. We made our way down to Palit and got a chance to pick up the card in person and also talk about some of the main features along with the new series on a whole with our friendly marketing contact there.

So, with that said, let's look at the package of the card. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card itself and see just what Palit are offering us before looking at the specification side of things. Once we've done that we'll look over our testbed and get into the performance side of things to see just what kind of performance this brand new GTX 680 from Palit can offer us.

Package

Normally we wouldn't go into too much detail on the box these days but; Oh My God! Palit has done a fantastic job with the new package design. It looks awesome and it feels so much more grown up. I always loved "Frobot", I thought he was kind of cool. But it did feel a little childish, the new JetStream packaging looks great, though, and the Black and Gold theme looks perfect. The Chinese character of "fong" (wind in English) appears in many places and is very stylish.

Inside the box we've also got a really good description of the cooler and some of the main features that the card offers. Hopefully we're not dealing with just some marketing talk and instead get to see a product that really stands out here.

As for the bundle there is a manual, driver CD, DVI to VGA connector, HDMI to DVI connector and dual 6-pin PCI Express to 8-pin PCI Express power connector. Palit have never been big on bundles and we're actually seeing more and more companies choose to shrink them and spend more time on the video card itself, which is ultimately going to end up being the best thing to do.