We are reaching the end of the article and it is time to draw some conclusions. We really like the compact 3-fan cooling system proposed by Gigabyte for the GTX 700 series which has also proved to be silent during heavy use, while keeping the temperatures to a decent level. However, we must make sure to have a well ventilated case since we have seen that the card evacuates a lot of hot air on the lateral and this must be evacuated in order to avoid recirculation.

During disassembly, we have seen that the custom cooler can be removed quite easily by removing the bottom screws but we must be careful when lifting it from the PCB since the thermal pads are still a little glued to the memory modules and the VRM components. To avoid PCB bending, Gigabyte has used a metallic rib which travels from one side to the other of the card, which eliminates the need of having a backplate. Something similar we have also seen at the HIS 7850 video card, which was covering only half of the PCB but has proven effective. Using a backplate or a metallic rib is really necessary with many custom cooling solutions since these are heavy and we have seen the impact of a MK-26 cooler on a 7970 without a backplate, where bending caused black screens and restarts.

Without a doubt, during the benchmarks the card has shown its teeth and succeeded to beat the 7970GHz Edition without a lot of effort and sometimes by a large margin. The card is overclocked from the factory only on the GPU core, but with the help of OC GURU II we can customize the card speeds by working with both clocks. Without increasing the core voltage, we have raised the clocks in small steps and achieved quite a consistent overclock; signs of instability were represented by artifacts appearing on screen when the memory clock was pushed over the limit and also driver resets when the GPU clock speed was raised too much. Here is what we have obtained after some tweaking:

What is interesting is the fact that Gigabyte has not decided to raise the price over the stock Nvidia design which is about $649, making this model more attractive considering that it comes pre-overclocked.

Gigabyte GTX 780 WindForce OC 3GB Video Card is Recommeded For:

We would like to thank again to Gigabyte Taiwan for making this review possible!