Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming Graphics Card Review

NVIDIA’s GeForce 900 Series has been a long time coming and gamers have anxiously awaited it. NVIDIA has been using the Kepler architecture for quite sometime and when Maxwell was introduced last year we only saw the entry-level and budget friendly cards. When we finally got word that we would be seeing performance segment Maxwell cards let’s just say we got excited. Today we will be looking at our first review of a GeForce 900 series card and it comes in the form of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming. For starters the GeForce GTX 970 has 1664 CUDA cores, 104 texture units, 64 ROPs and packs 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Normally this card would have speeds of 1050 MHz core and 1178 MHz boost, but Gigabyte has overclocked their version to speeds of 1178 MHz core and 1329 MHz boost. On top of that Gigabyte has implemented their latest WindForce 3X cooler on the card to give you the best cooling possible. Let’s get this card on the bench and see what it can do!

Specifications
Chipset: GeForce GTX 970
Core Clock: Base / Boost clock:1178 / 1329 MHz
Process Technology: 28 nm
Memory Clock: 7Gbps
Memory Size: 4 GB
Memory Bus: 256 bit
Memory Type: GDDR5
Card Bus: PCI-E 3.0
DirectX: 12
OpenGL: 4.4
PCB Form: ATX
Digital max resolution: 4096 X 2160
Analog max resolution: 2048 x 1536
Multi-view: 4
I/O: Dual-link DVI-I / DVI-D / DisplayPort*3 / HDMI*1
Card size: L=312mm, W=129mm, H=43mm
Power requirement: 550W(with one 6-pin and one 8-pin external power connectors)

Packaging
The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming comes in Gigabyte’s typical retail packaging. On the front it highlights some of the main features which include Super Overclock, FLEX display and WindForce cooling.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming

Flipping the box over to the back it goes into detail on the WindForce cooler, GPU Gauntlet sorting, and the FLEX display. The GPU sorting is something that I did want to highlight. What that means is that Gigabyte tests all of the GPUs that they are allocated to see which ones perform the best. These chips are the only chips that are used in the G1 Gaming Series Super Overclock graphics cards. EVGA actually does the same thing with their SuperClock cards.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming

Opening the box up and seeing what’s inside we have the GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming Card, an 8pin PCIe to Molex power adapter, 6pin PCIe to Molex power adapter and a quick start guide.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming

For a full unboxing and overview of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming graphics card be sure to check out our video below.

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