Gigabyte GTX 770 OC WindForce 3x 2GB Review

We’ve already seen how the GTX 770 is able to give a great balance between performance and cost with NVIDIA’s MSRP of £329 being far more attractive than that of the GTX 780. As Always, Gigabyte like to go one better over the reference card designs, in a bid to set their products apart from the competition. It has to be said that considering the GTX 770 has only just been released, this is the first non-reference card that I’ve managed to have a look and play with, but that said, this is a great starting point in showing the potential of the GK104 core within the new 700 series.

One factor that I particularly love about Gigabyte’s latest WindForce based card is the new cooler design. The use of metal over the older plastic shrouding gives the cooler a whole new lease of life and brings it right up to date as well as giving a certain element of class as well. It’s also good to see that Gigabyte have crammed in as much surface area real estate as they can – even tightly surrounding the power connectors – in order to make dissipation of heat more effective to keep the overclocked core cool under the collar.

Mentioning overclocking, Gigabyte have always had a tendency to overclock their cards at the factory to a level where there is little extra to be had without taking things to an extreme level and this is true yet again with only a mediocre overclock seen on the GK104 core. On the memory side of thing however, I have to say that I am yet again very impressed with the new memory choice on NVIDIA’s part. The stock 7Gbps memory that is used is already running at a faster speed to what we have traditionally seen from vRAM, but to see it overclock close to the 8Gbps mark on stock cooling is highly impressive; the increase in straight line performance within 3DMark along was enough to say this has a good impact on the card.

Whilst all this extra performance and new cooler design is well and good, some may wonder what the impact is on the price over a NVIDIA’s MSRP of £329 for the GTX 770, well it has to be said that at £365.99, the WindForce card is a bit more expensive, however you do get you money’s worth with the extra spend, both on the front of performance out of the box with the overclock and cooling, but also the pure beauty of the new cooler design.

eTeknix Says: Following the launch of the GTX 770, Gigabyte’s WindForce cooled overclocked card has blown me away yet again and I can only wait for more from them in the future.