Published: October 14, 2014 | Source: Gigabyte | Author: Tom Logan

Gigabyte G1 GTX980 Super Overclock Review

Conclusion

To say that the GTX980 is worthy of purchase is akin to pointing out that water is wet, the sky blue, the Pope Catholic and bears do something in woods. So far, so obvious.

Does the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX980 Super Overclock Windforce, as well as owning a lengthy name, have what it takes to prise your wallet open?

Naturally the sign on the door says “Overclock3D” so overclocking our graphics cards to extract a little extra performance is our bread and butter. We know that the majority of people actually don’t overclock their cards. Whether it’s the worry of potentially killing a very expensive piece of hardware, the fear that your particular GPU will not overclock as well as some others you’ve seen on the internet, or just the amount of time necessary to make it worth your while, a lot of people just leave the card how it appears out of the packaging and get on with their life. With a card that has such a beefy factory overclock as standard then those of you who are looking for a stock card to tweak then much of the work has been done for you, our sample for example struggled to achieve an overclock worth testing again no matter what time and effort we put in. Sadly it would appear we did not win the silicone lottery this time around If you’re, like so many, wanting something already massaged towards brilliance then the Gigabyte should be on your shortest shortlist. The performance is fantastic in every single benchmark and the power requirements haven’t skyrocketed to cope, even with 8+8 on the power input.

The second part of that lengthy name caused some shudders in the office. Windforce. A cooler which has always delivered quietness and cooling but, almost without exception, has never looked like it fit on the card it was applied to. It was as if Gigabyte designed a two fan and a three fan cooler and then applied it to every PCB whether it fit or not. With the GTX980 Windforce they’ve drastically altered the design and it looks gorgeous. Very angular and, most importantly, it fits the card perfectly. Even the backplate has got ventilation holes in all the right places and a very crisp G1 Gaming logo.

It’s cool, it’s quiet, it looks epic and it goes like a simile we can’t use on a family website. It’s all things to all people and we like it very much, which is why it wins our OC3D Gold Award.