The Nvidia GTX 680 is a beast of a graphics chomper, delivering some of the fastest speeds you can possibly get from a single processor. But video cards are often loud as hell. Fans! Ugh! Not this one.
It’s simple physics: video cards suck down a lot of electricity, create a lot of heat, and need a lot of cooling to prevent them from melting through the bottom of your computer and down to the Earth’s core. This usually means at least one whiny fan that can turn your tower into a wind tunnel during gaming marathons — but not if you’re using this GTX 680 from Chinese card maker colourful. Hexus reports the company replaces fans with one hell of a passive cooling setup:
Colorful isn’t taking any chances and includes a total of 20 heatpipes (including the six 8mm-thick heatpipes used in the heatsink-connecting bridge) combined with a massive 240 aluminium fins.
That is… gigantic. It’ll eat up extra space on your motherboard, meaning you won’t be able to plug in as many extra cards as you would otherwise. It could also be heavy to the point of bending the entire motherboard itself, the snapping of which might interrupt the blissful passive-cooled silence. Also, don’t overclock this unless you want it to die swiftly.