Nvidia’s GTX Titan has been bound by strict AIB Partner guidelines of late and while we are not sure if any restrictions have been lifted, we have already seen the likes of Colorful with some fancy non-reference designs but we have seen no other GPU vendors do the same. Now Gigabyte appear to be circumventing these Nvidia partner guidelines in a quite sneaky way, suggesting they haven’t actually been lifted. Basically Gigabyte are bundling a GTX Titan with their WindForce 3X VGA cooler. This means technically they are selling you a stock GTX Titan but you have the ability to upgrade it.
The star of the show really is Gigabyte’s WindForce 3X cooler which has five copper heat pipes, a very dense aluminium heatsink stack and three 80mm fans. Gigabyte pre-overclock the card even with the stock cooler but if you want to maintain those overclocked speeds under high loads it is recommended you use this WindForce 3X cooler to achieve those highest GPU Boost clock speeds. The overclocked speeds are 928MHz core, 980MHz GPU Boost and 6GHz memory.
Included you get all the mounting kit parts, which includes two tubes of thermal paste and you also get bundled a cleaning cloth and a Gigabyte mousepad. Gigabyte will probably price this card at a premium over normal GTX Titan’s to the tune of around $200/£150 more (minimum) I suspect, we will let you know when we get actual pricing.
Images courtesy of Gigabyte/TechPowerUp
Very sneaky & clever of Gigabyte, also nothing wrong with charging a few extra bones for it. I was under the impression that your warranty was immediately voided once the original cooler was jimmied off but I suppose the boys at Gigabyte have got that covered as well, not that yanking the cooler off my card to replace the thermal grease while it was under warranty ever bothered me.
i am in it to win it
This is too hardcore. I am not sure I would ever be up to it.