Heaven is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items.
Unigine’s Heaven benchmark sees a significant gain in frame rate at 1680×1050 with nearly 20fps extra. 1920 and 2560 resolutions also see a health gain over the reference 770 although, not on the same scale as 1680×1050.
The Windforce cooler, although effective, is the ugliest cooling solution ever conceived, It’s a real eyesore IMO. Yuck.
I totally second this. There are many better looking dual-fan coolers from Asus, MSI..
Gigabyte should learn from them.
It’s really a good cooler (although it’s ghastly). If you ever buy a Gigabyte card with that cooler all you have to do is yank it off, get rid of that over applied glop the manufacturer calls thermal grease, replace it with a good quality paste (applied properly of course) and you’ll see the temps plummet even further.
Well, that’s bad.
P.S. I never used Gigabyte cards..
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. They’ve cleaned up the blue PCB and other than that its just a rather standard looking triple fan black VGA cooler
It’s just personal taste. I actually use a Gigabyte GFX card with the Windforce cooler but I can’t see it so it doesn’t bother me but I have no complaints about it’s cooling prowess. Although the colour of the PCB is important to some people, somebody pointed out to me that that it was no longer blue but black, I hadn’t even noticed. Working with these things all day long for a number of years, one tends to become jaded & cynical. I think it’s time for a break.
Except for the ugly outlook, it is good if not great in terms of performance.
GTX770 is itself a very good chip though.
Having a window in your PC is so 2001, who cares what it looks like? You only see the top of the PCB anyway, all that matters is how good it cools.
I actually liked Gigabyte’s cooler design and PCB color enough to buy two of them…670 style…but to each their own I guess.
Can’t let these vain naysayers convince people not to get the card just from its looks.