At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking that the EVGA card is a reference cooler. There are however a few little differences. The shroud is near identical to the reference design save for the shape, it is more 'square' and doesn't have the angular features of the reference cooler. The fan is identical to reference and funnels air across the stock heatsink with the hot air being expelled out through the I/O backplate.



The heatsink is a basic design which disappoints as I was hoping for a vapor change design but alas it is simply a copper tab soldered to an aluminium fin array. The contact to the core was however very good.



The same reference mid-plate is also found on the EVGA Signature Superclocked card as with other GTX680's based on the reference design. Small sticky thermal tabs are situated around the plate to ensure efficient heat transfer.



Here is where the card differs slightly from reference having a 5+2 instead of 4+2 phase design. With this extra muscle, the EVGA card should produce cleaner power and thus hopefully (crosses fingers) give us a decent overclock.



The same reference HYNIX memory is included with the EVGA card as with the standard NVIDIA GTX680. With a product code of H5GQ2H24MFA R0C we know that this memory is capable of some fantastic results rated at 1.6v to run at 6Gbps so hopefully there will also be some overclocking here too although consideration should be given to the fact that the EVGA SC Signature already has the memory clocked to 1552MHz (6208Mhz effective) so it is already well over spec!



Here we see the GK104 core which is fully exposed to the elements save for a nickel surround protecting it from damage from wobbly heatsinks. Pre-overclocked to 1085MHz it makes the AMD HD7970 1GHz edition cards look slow by comparison. Will this translate to real world performance though? I guess it's time we found out...