Introduction

The GTX 680 has become a little quiet for NVIDIA with partners not doing a whole lot with the model lately. To be honest it feels like a little bit of a mistake considering how aggressive AMD has been lately with its high-end Radeon offerings. The release of the new GHz Edition HD 7970 means that AMD get in the spotlight again when it comes to high-end models and the upcoming dual GPU 7990 is going to shine more light on them.

Saying all that, though, we can see that Inno3D have mixed it up with the tongue twisting Inno3D GTX 680 iChill Black Series Accelero Hybrid 4GB video card. When Inno3D asked if we wanted to look at it we jumped at the chance to see a new GTX 680. It wasn't until the card arrived and I pulled it out of the box to realize we had a cool video card on our hands. What makes it so cool? Well, we will find that out in just a moment.

As always there's a few things that we need to do before we take a closer look at the card and the first thing is to see what's going on with the package and the contents. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card to see what exactly is going on. From there we move onto the specifications. With the card being as cool as it is, though, we have taken the chance to overclock it as well so while we'll look at the out of the box clock speeds we'll then take the time to see how we went with the overclocking side of things.

Finally we'll move into the testbed side of things and then we'll also cover the cards that we'll be including in our testbed today before we then get into the performance side of things. As mentioned, though, let's see what's going on with the package and bundle here today.

Package

Checking out the box we don't actually have heaps of detail. We've got the model name along with mention that it carries 4GB of GDDR5 while there's mention of 3DMark 11 being included. Turning over we've got some text about the model on a whole.

Moving inside the box and looking at the package you can see we've got an iChill mouse pad included along with a bit of paperwork including a 3DMark 11 key and some manuals in regards to setting the card up. We've also got a power supply guideline booklet which gives you an idea on what kind of power supply you should be using for the card while you can also see we've got a driver CD.

Along with all that you can see above we've also got a dual Molex to 8-pin PCIe power connector, DVI to VGA connector and a bunch of screws along with a couple of washers to help setup the card. Yes, washers! Read on!