Product Showcase

One of the key ingredients to the Gigabyte WindForce X3 based G1 Gaming series is their high performance cooling. 

Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters Gigabyte will try to force as much performance out of the card at a maximum threshold of roughly  65 Degrees C for this 970 model card.

At the top of the card you can see the two power headers. The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers, this one offers one 6 and one 8 pin header. So that should allow you to get a little more juice into the card for a better tweaking experience. To the right you can see the WindForce logo, this is LED enabled and animated but configurable with software. 
 

There are six phases responsible for supplying the GPU and, two additional phases power supply is dedicated for the board’s GDDR5 memory (4 chokes though). As you can see, the card has SLI connectors so if you've got cash to spend, 2, 3 and 4-way SLI are an option to pursue, though we always recommend two cards maximum for the best scaling and as few driver issues as possible.
 

The new design looks great, all dark themed. Tweaked we’ve seen this 970 board reaching over 1.4 GHz on the Turbo clock frequency, very nice but we'll talk more about that later on in this article.