Gainward's Fermi-based Phantom series has received much praise and attention but Kepler is here and it's time to move forward. For the time being, the GPU only powers GTX 680 cards but thankfully, Gainward's Phantom is aimed at high-end cards to begin with. So, our today's guest is Gainward's GTX 680 Phantom graphics card.

Gainward's offer already boasts three GTX 680 graphics cards and we hear that a new GTX 680 Phantom is around the corner, this time with 4GB of memory. This should be interesting news, since reference GTX 680 cards come with 2GB of memory, but extreme resolutions suggest that the GTX 680 would prefer a larger buffer.

The Phantom card we tested comes with reference 2GB of memory, which is factory overclocked just like the GPU.

Note that reference GPU clock is 1006MHz whereas the Phantom runs at 1085MHz. The card's memory runs at 1575MHz, which is 73MHz (292MHz effcetively) higher than reference.

Although factory overclocking is a welcome addition, we believe that it's the card's cooling that will attract users even more. According to Gainward's internal tests, Phantom cooling should be up to 6°C cooler and up to 11.5 dB quieter.

Of course, we'll check these results but we're pretty sure we will only confirm them. Quite expectedly, since Gainward used a two and a half slots wide heatsink with two fans.