Gainward GTX 760 Phantom 2GB Graphics Card Review

Conclusion

Gainward’s GTX 760 Phantom costs £220 in the UK. Compared to the price of most entry and reference GTX 760’s that cost about £200-210 the Gainward GTX 760 Phantom is roughly 10% more expensive. Now right away some of you might be thinking the Gainward GTX 760 Phantom is a little on the expensive side but we can clearly see that the Gainward GTX 760 Phantom offers up a lot more than we’d expect from a normal GTX 760. Not only does it perform brilliantly, thanks to its excellent cooling solution that allows it to reach maximum GPU boost speeds, but it is also by far the quietest graphics card we have tested. I’d probably go as far as to say its the quietest GTX 760 on the market. Additionally we have seen that it is relatively frugal on power which is impressive given that it is overclocked out of the box, it does much better than other GTX 760s we have tested by as much as 50W at maximum load which clearly shows Gainward have made very efficient decisions in terms of their VRM and PCB implementation.

In terms of the negatives there was very little to pick at. We found overclocking reaped little in terms of significant results which was quite sad. Of course experiences will vary by the silicon lottery and it isn’t really anything to complain too much about as the card is already overclocked by 10% out of the box. The cooler’s shroud was also a bit of a dust magnet which could be frustrating to the user who likes to have a nice clean system, and of course the brown PCB isn’t ideal given that the whole graphics card uses a black shroud and theme. That said dark brown is certainly a lot better than blue, green or red. In the grand scheme of things you’ll very rarely see the back of the card anyway, when installed you mainly see the top – which is black and looks good.

As with all GTX 760s at the moment the Gainward GTX 760 Phantom is part of the free Splinter Cell Blacklist promotion so we would encourage all users to pick this up as it just adds some extra value to the graphics card. Of course that means making sure you pick up the Gainward GTX 760 Phantom from one of the participating retailers.

Pros

• Super quiet
• Good out-of-the-box performance
• Low power consumption
• Great aesthetics
• Free Splinter Cell Blacklist game bundle (from selected retailers)
• Solid price considering performance

Cons

• Further overclocking was rather limited in terms of results
• Brown PCB, not black like the colour of the cooler’s shroud
• Cooler shroud is a dust-magnet
• More than double slot thickness

eTeknix says: “Gainward’s GTX 760 Phantom is a true winner of a graphics card. It is super quiet, has higher than stock performance right out of the box, it looks great and it is reasonably priced given the unique cooler it uses. If you are looking for a high performance Nvidia graphics card, without the price premium of the higher end GPUs, then you cannot go wrong with the Gainward GTX 760 Phantom. The Gainward GTX 760 Phantom comes highly recommended from eTeknix and we definitely think it is worth paying that extra 10% over the price of a “normal “GTX 760 because it offers so much more.”

Thank you to Gainward for providing this review sample.