Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase: GeForce GTX 970

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 970, again a 'G1 Gaming' Edition (bear in mind that these are SOC editions), which come with a faster standard clock frequency. Gigabyte completely overhauled their board from the reference design. You will spot a custom PCB with six phases and one 6 and one 8-pin power header for a little more overclocking headroom. The PCB is matte black in color and of course a WindForce cooler is being used. The 980 model will get the new 600W model BTW, this 970 uses the more regular 3X version.

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 1178 MHz, while there is boost allowance up-to 1329 MHz (just like the 980 G1 Gaming SOC edition). This card has less shader processors though. 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 is based on a nice thin dual-slot solution, it is heat-pipe based. The air flow is split through a fan edge and is guided through the fan with the special striped curve design. 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 145 Watts, but due to the higher clocks and extensive tweaking design please allow for 15, maybe 20 extra Watts, these boards have been designed with overclocking in mind. The GPU has six power phases alone being fed from one 6 and one 8-pin power header. In combo with component selection this 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. We'll look at its effect with thermal imaging later on in this article.
 

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?