Following this morning launch of Nvidia's new GM204 Maxwell based Geforce GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards, Gigabyte has unveiled the new Geforce GTX 980 G1 Gaming and the Geforce GTX 970 G1 Gaming, both featuring custom design and the excellent Windforce 3X 600W triple-fan cooler.


Gigabyte is actually one of the first and one of the rare partners that had a custom Geforce GTX 980 graphics card ready for reviews on the launch day and we had a chance to see how well does the fully enabled GM204 GPU on the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming behaves with custom cooling. Gigabyte actually did not even launch a reference design but rather chose to use the same design for both its own GTX 980 and the GTX 970 graphics cards.

The custom PCB, which we think is the same for both graphics cards since we only have details for the GTX 980 G1 Gaming, features 8-phase GPU VRM, Ultra Durable graphics card components as well as Gigabyte's Dual Bios technology. What is more interesting is that it comes with a slightly different display output configuration as Gigabyte has decided to change the reference design and include yet another DVI ports, since the custom Windforce 3X 600W cooler is a top fan cooler rather than a blower style one, so there is no need for big rear I/O bracket grill.

The big star is the new Gigabyte Windforce 3X 600W cooler which is actually and surprisingly a dual-slot cooler. It has a large heatsink with special fin architecture which is connected to the GPU via six composite heatpipes (5x8mm and 1x6mm) while three top fans feature unique fan blade design and Triangle Cool technology. All of these made it quite a performer with incredible overclocking potential as we have seen in our review.

While we still do not have full details regarding the Gigabyte Geforce GTX 970 G1 Gaming, and will update this article as soon as we get them, the Geforce GTX 980 G1 Gaming ended up factory overclocked to 1228MHz for the GPU base clock, 1329MHz for the GPU Boost clock, while 4GB of GDDR5 memory was left at reference 7000MHz.

In case you missed it during launch, the GTX 980 is based on a fully enabled GM204 GPU with 2048 CUDA cores, 128 TMUs and 64 ROPs, while the GTX 970 packs slightly less 1664 CUDA cores, 104 TMUs and 64 ROPs. Both graphics cards ship with 4GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.

We expect both new Gigabyte the GTX 980 G1 Gaming and the GTX 970 G1 Gaming to go for a bit over Nvidia's official MSRP for those graphics cards, which is set at US $549 and US $329, but hopefully we willl see them in retail quite soon.





Source: Gigabyte.com.