Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming review - Product Showcase

One of the key ingredients to the 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 cards at a maximum threshold of roughly 65 Degrees C for the 980 models.

The latest 600W with cooling technology can dissipate up to 600W of heat. Here are some Gigabyte marketing pointers on that:

• Patented “Triangle Cool” technology enhances 35% cooling performance
• Features with the patented “Triangle Cool” technology, WINDFORCE 600W can bring away the heat easily from GPU. The cooling performance is 35% better than the regular fin designs.
• Unique fan design increases 23% CFM 
• The whole new fan design with special 3D stripe curve can split the air flow, reduce the calm zone and increase the cooling performance. The air flow is amazingly increased up to 23%!
• Special fin architecture augments 45% heat dissipation area
• GIGABYTE also designs WINDFORCE 600W with a special fin architecture. The height differentiation design increases more than 45% heat dissipation area for better cooling capacity and significantly reduce the air resistance.
• Composite heat-pipes increases 29% cooling capacity

The cooling system is supplemented by composite heat-pipes, a heat-transfer device combines both thermal conductivity and phase transition for managing the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces with increases of 29% cooling capacity.

 

At the top of the card you can see the two 8-pin power headers. The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers. So that should get you 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. 
 

An 8 phase power supply is responsible for supplying the GPU power and two more for memory. 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.
 

Quite a looker eh? Tweaked we’ve seen this board reaching 1.5 GHz on the Turbo clock frequency, kinda crazy but very nice I can tell you. But we'll show you all that later on in this article.