Gigabyte Gaming OC RTX 2070 Super Review

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The packaging for the Gigabyte Gaming OC RTX 2070 Super certainly grabs your attention with the cybernetic eye peering out. The box also clearly explains how the central fan on the Gigabyte cooler design counter-rotates to help eliminate dead spots and keep the heatsink working as efficiently as possible. Cooler temperatures equal higher boost clocks equal higher performance. Lovely.

  
  

The Gigabyte cooler design will be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the world of graphics cards. The design of the shroud and fans is such a strong visual statement it has become an identity of the brand and it seems that all the major manufacturers are now following the path laid out by MSI with their Twin Frozr. With three fans and lots of angles the Gigabyte cooler is easy on the eye. It strikes the difficult balance of being designed for performance without being fussy.

  

Given how much design effort goes in to the fan sides of cards it always makes us chuckle that the backplate is the area we actually look at through our windows, unless you’ve mounted your system on the ceiling or use the vertical mounting bracket available on some cases.

  

The design of the fans is important but the heatsink fin density is still the most important part of a graphics card cooler. The better the passive performance of the heatsink is the less the fans have to spin to keep them cool, which reduces noise whilst also increasing potential thermal headroom. The Gigabyte cooler has a huge fin density and plenty of heat pipes to keep the card as cool as possible with minimal airflow.

  

This is the business end of the heat pipes and you can see that they definitely are large and in charge, with hybrid construction helping improve heat transfer efficiency.

  

Lastly the display output section finds us with the now standard selection of DisplayPort and HDMI outputs as well as the USB Type-C connector.