Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase: GeForce GTX 980

Let's start with our photo-shoot. Two pages worth of photos then and all of them from our own photo-shoot.

So as you can see, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 is now offered as a 'G1 Gaming' Edition. Ehm, yeah it seems that the 'Gaming' denominator was borrowed from a competitor? Ah well, welcome to the tech industry. As you can see, Gigabyte completely overhauled their board from the reference design. You will spot a custom PCB with eight phase and two 8-pin power headers for a little more overclocking headroom. The PCB is matte black in color and of course the new 600W WindForce cooler is being used. These cards will look just gorgeous in a white/black PC.

The card is like 29~30 cm due to the cooler though, so please do check out if it fits inside your chassis, as that is a bit on the lengthy side of things. This is the SOC edition of the G1 Gaming series, meaning it has higher factory clocks, quite impressive as well. The GPU core base clock is ticking over at 1228 MHz, while there is boost allowance up-to 1329 MHz - holy momma! The memory has been kept reference at 7.0 GHz (effective data-rate) on its 256-bit wide memory bus of 4GB GDDR5 memory.

The card itself is a dual-slot solution, it is composite heat-pipe based with 5x8mm & 1x6mm pipes. The air flow is split through a fan edge and is guided through the fan with the special striped curve design. According to Gigabyte that effectively enhances the air flow by 23% over traditional fans, whilst reducing air turbulence. Gigabyte has applied their ultra durable component selection and a dual-bios. On top you will spot an illuminated LED, with customizable brightness and animation.

The card will have a maximum power design of 165 Watts, but due to the high clocks and extensive tweaking design please add 15, maybe 20 extra Watts, this puppy was made to overclock. the eight power phases and two 8-pin power headers in combo with component selection should be plenty for a nice tweak (or two). Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well. 

The card will get no less than six display connectors, you'll spot three full size Display Port connectors, one full size HDMI 2.0 connector and two DVI connectors (dual-link). HDMI is 2.0 compatible meaning that compatible monitors and tellys can do UHD at 60 Hz, DP is 1.2 but has support for eDP 1.4. Your maximum resolution can be 5120 x 3200 pixels at 60 Hz. You can combine these connectors to set up a surround view (multi-monitor) setup. To date we still receive this question a lot, but dual-link DVI does not mean you can hook up two monitors to one connector. Dual-link means double the signal, that way monitor resolutions over 1920x1200 can be supported, or you could use a 120Hz monitor. So explained very simply, dual-link DVI supports high-resolution (above 1920x1200) or high-refresh rate (120Hz) monitors. Oh and if you're wondering 'why three DP ports?' Well how does surround view Ultra HD with three monitors sound?