Gainward Phantom GTX570 Review

Gainward Phantom GTX570 Review

Introduction

The GTX570 has been one of the big surprises of recent times, fixing all the issues of the original Fermi nVidia cards and performing incredibly well for the reasonable price charged. With a good chip you can expect to overclock it up to stock GTX580 speeds.

Unquestionably it’s the card we’d recommend as the major player on the market at the moment.

Gainward have been producing graphics cards for a very long time. Indeed your authors first upgrade after the Voodoo 2 and Riva TNT days was to a Gainward model.

The most famous of the Gainward series is unquestionably the Golden Sample labelled cards which come with a good factory overclock and always managed to go further still.

Today however we have a new model from them labelled the Phantom. The surprise being that rather than concentrate on pushing the Silicon as hard as possible they’ve brought us a very different looking cooling solution indeed and only overclocked the GPU mildly.

Technical Specifications

A quick look at the specifications shows that the apart from the 18MHz GPU overclock the Gainward Phantom is very much a standard card.

Product Name  :    Gainward GeForce® GTX 570 1280MB “Phantom”
GPU  :    GeForce GTX 570
GPU Clockspeed  :    750 Mhz
Memory  :    1280MB GDDR5 (320 bits)
Memory Clockspeed  :    1950 Mhz
Pixels per clock (peak)  :    N/A
Bandwidth  :    156 GB/s
Ramdac  :    400 MHz
Bus  :    PCI-Express 2.0
Cooling  :    2.5-Slot/Three Fans cooler
Video-Features  :    HDMI
Connectivity  :    Dual DVI-I, DisplayPort

 

Of course the cooler is the real selling point of this, so let’s move on and take a look at that.Â