Gainward Phantom GeForce GTX 970 4GB Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing (accurate at the time of writing)

Gainward’s Phantom GTX 970 costs £285 at Scan Computers in the UK which is a 10% premium over the reference pricing. Gainward supply a 2 year warranty with this product.

Summary 

Gainward’s Phantom series of graphics cards are hugely under-rated in my opinion. The reason for this probably stems from Gainward’s comparatively small status compared to “big boys” like ASUS and EVGA, but this shouldn’t be the case. As our testing shows Gainward’s Phantom cooler does an excellent job of keeping the Nvidia Maxwell GTX 970 GPU running cool and extremely quiet even with a significant overclock. Better still, that treatment comes with a reasonable 10% premium over the baseline pricing and it offers you one of the best looking GTX 970s on the market. I was also pleased to see Gainward preserve the full flexibility of Nvidia’s GTX 970 display IO, many other vendors sacrificed most of the DisplayPort connections for additional ventilation.

On the negative side it is fair to say the 2.5 slot design may be an issue for users with smaller motherboards or cases: if you know this might be a compatibility issue then we strongly recommend you measure up how much space you have to spare. I also feel that the decision to deploy mini HDMI and DisplayPort connections is inconvenient from a usability-standpoint as no adapters are provided. On the other hand it was a smart move as it preserves all the display flexibility: I guess you can’t have it all!

Pros

• Totally silent
• Significant out of the box overclock
• Modest premium over baseline pricing
• Sleek aesthetics
• Good I/O flexibility

Cons

• Short 2 year warranty
• 2.5 slot design is thicker than rival solutions
• Mini I/O ports have no adapters

“No company quite makes a graphics card like the Phantom series. It is great to see that the Gainward GTX 970 Phantom continues that tradition of offering a unique graphics card product in an otherwise quite cautious market.”

Thank you to Gainward for providing this review sample.