Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 Windforce 5X Super Overclock 2GB GDDR5 - Quintuple Cooling
Temperature & Power Consumption Results
Temperature Results
Considering its high core and memory clock speeds, Gigabyte's Windforce 5X cooler was quite impressive, registering a full 11 degrees cooler temperature than the Palit overclocked card and was even a little cooler than the reference card operating at reference speeds. While MSI's cooler was even better, it also has much lower clock speeds, consistently scoring about 5-6% worse than Gigabyte in our benchmarks.
One thing to note is that the Windforce 5X is quite loud. Even at low fan RPM, there's a high-pitched whining sound from the 40mm fans. Individually, we suspect the fans are fairly average in terms of noise levels, but five of them spinning at the same time does add up. This is probably the card's main pitfall as using smaller fans generally does lead to higher noise levels as they have to spin faster to ensure they are able to move the same amount of air as a larger cooler. Of course the design choice was obviously to keep the card within reasonable dimensions and yet overpower the competition, thus leading to the overall design of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 Windforce 5X Super OC graphics card. This is a choice you'll have to make in advance if you're all out for performance, no matter the cost, or prefer something more reasonably acceptable but conventionally designed.
Power Consumption Results
As expected, Gigabyte was the worst performer in terms of power consumption, drawing 25% more power than the reference design at load. As we saw in our benchmark results, the extra power requirement seemed to stem from its highly overclocked GPU and its many cooling fans as we didn't register a higher GPU Boost.