Cooling and Noise
With Nvidia’s design for the GTX 680 being a very power efficient design I was a little excited to get the card into our Furmark 1080p benchmark to see how the new heatsink design works. Furmark pushes the card well beyond what you would ever be able to do in game. That means our results are going to be higher than you should ever see under stock clocks. But the idea is to make sure that you will never have your GTX 680 overheat at stock speeds and also to compare it to other cards we have tested.
After running through the test we ended up with a max temperature of 74 degrees Celsius. For a stock cooler on a flagship card, this isn’t bad. We have seen higher temperatures from the AMD side of things, even with aftermarket coolers.
While doing this testing we are able to get a good listen to both the cards idle noise levels and how loud to expect it to be when it’s at max load. At both idle and max load I was impressed with the GTX 680’s noise level. At idle the card was nearly silent; considering our open air bench gives us an up close listen to the card this is very impressive! It’s even more impressive when you add in that this is a reference design; it really is amazing how far they have come in the last few years. When loaded up there is obviously more noise output but it’s better than one would expect and actually less than what we have seen on any other reference coolers to date.