Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 980 4GB Review

Temperatures

The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when choosing a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are extremely important. Lower temperatures are always better and with AMD and Nvidia opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account it is important that graphics card vendors use high performance cooling solutions in order to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching dangerous temperatures are now in the past but the importance of lower temperatures still remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds .We take temperature readings after 5 minutes of three different load scenarios: desktop idle, Furmark load and Unigine Heaven load. We always record actual temperatures and make a note of the ambient. In the case where more than 1 GPU is used an average is created.

Cooling is where the G1 Gaming GTX 980 shines, compared to the reference model which thermal throttled in both our tests whereas the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming barely got into the mid 70s. In typical extended gaming sessions the GPU didn’t go higher than 65 which means there’s a ton of overclocking headroom without reaching the thermal throttle point of 80 and there’s also room to tune-down the fans to a less aggressive profile if silence is more your thing.