Strip her down
Here's one we prepared earlier! The frame disengages easily and the extensive power-delivery and regulation dominates the PCB. Common with the Classified of the GTX 580 ilk, this one uses EVGA's 14+3-phase VRM topology, where 14 phases run to the GPU and the remaining three to the memory, compared with the six-phase (4+2) for - yup, you guessed it - the reference card. The surfeit of voltage regulation is the main cause for the huge PCB. Extra phases help to deliver more sustained, smooth power that is a must when pushing frequency to the limit.
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The frame has plenty of thermal tape to surround all the hot-running chips, and the cooler, featuring vapour-chamber technology, bears obvious similarities to NVIDIA card's, albeit with an extra section up top.
Oh, did we say it was big? As an aside, though we rarely mention it, EVGA's bundle, while lacking games, feels suitably premium. Every cable is wrapped in its own anti-static bag, the Molex-to-PCIe adapters are robust, and general documentation is first-class. The card is backed by a three-year warranty, too.
Pre-review summary
The EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified 4GB uses a wholly-custom PCB and cooling in order to better the fine reference design by NVIDIA. Clocked in at 1,111MHz GPU, boosting to 1,176MHz, but disappointing us with no overclocking on the memory, this £500 behemoth also stands out by equipping the GPU with a double-sized framebuffer.
