Gainward Phantom GTX570 Review

Up Close

Clarity is definitely the order of the day here. No need to have pictures taken from the front of Steven Jackson books here. The only slight odd thing is the stylised use of a lower-case h in the PhANTOM. The only thing we can think of is that it means ph as in acid balance. But that makes no sense.

      

The accessories package is the standard fare we’re used to seeing with a graphics card. A slim manual, a power adaptor, a DVI adaptor and the driver disk that’s out of date the moment it’s pressed.

The card itself… WOW. Stunning. It looks like a water-cooling radiator from nearly every angle and it took a while to manage to get the right combination between light and angle to ensure that you got a little peak into what lies beneath.

      

This is much more like the way you’ll see the Phantom usually. Bristling with heatpipes and a very smooth from. Of course the major change is that the Phantom has no obvious fans.

Moving the card around you can see that beneath the top section of the heatsink lay three 80mm fans which provide the cooling. It’s like a combination between a cover on a normal heatsink, and extra surface area. Either way it’s different and certainly eye-catching.

      

As well as the very subtle main box the card itself has a classy gold Gainward logo on the top face. This would marry perfectly to the Gigabyte UD7 we’ve just reviewed. Anyone for a black and gold rig?

Underneath the cooler the board is a standard nVidia GTX570 as we’d expect from the standard specifications.

   

The most impressive thing about the cooler is that it’s a single item. There aren’t any complex backplates or similar accoutrements, rather the cooler, fans, top piece and cabling all come off in one go.

With the cooler off we can take a good look at how the fans are sandwiched between the main body of the cooler and the top section that hides it all. Ingenious.