Introduction

Like a couple of NVIDIA only partners it's been a while since we've seen anything from Gainward and that's mainly due to the simple fact that NVIDIA partners haven't really had anything new to show off for the past few months. That is of course until we saw the release of the new GEFORCE 600 series video cards.

While at launch Gainward was ready with its reference design card, a few weeks after they had the Phantom model ready - a series that we've liked on their mid and high-end video cards since it launched. Today, though, we see the series get its fastest model yet, the GTX 680.

GTX 680 is a GPU we've loved since its launch - it has offered us incredible performance and the price tag NVIDIA launched the model at was super competitive. There's only ever been one issue the whole time. Stock has been quite pitiful since its launch on the market and it's not looking much better at the moment as you head on over to Newegg and see every model is out of stock.

Of course there are a few things we need to do before we get into the performance side of things. First thing we'll do is check out the package to see what Gainward has done before we move onto the video card itself.

Once we've done that we'll go over the specifications of this overclocked model from Gainward before we quickly cover our testbed and talk about some of the other video cards that will be in our graphs here today. Then it's onto the performance side of things before we wrap everything up. First things first, though, let's see what's going on with the package and bundle here today on Gainward's new GTX 680 2GB Phantom.

Package

Looking through the box we get a good idea of some of the main features including a factory overclock, 6-phase PWM and DrMOS. The two features that are most highlighted, though, come in terms of the cooler.

You can see that a large part of the focus is on the new Phantom cooler which is said to operate quieter than the reference cooler, while also helping make the video card run cooler. We'll find out how much truth there is to this a little later on when we get to testing the noise and temperature.

As for the bundle it's in fairly typical Gainward fashion that we don't see a lot going on. We've got a manual and driver CD alongside a DVI to VGA connector, HDMI to DVI connector and dual 6-pin PCIe to 8-pin PCIe power connector. Overall there is nothing all that exciting, but it includes everything you'll need to get the video card up and running.