Gigabyte has attached their own cooler and back plate to the G1 Gaming series cards. Personally, I own a pair of GTX 670 WINDFORCE 3x graphics cards and run them in SLI. Despite the WINDFORCE 3X cooler retaining the same name as 2 generations ago, the hardware is subtly different now and the new versions of the WINDFORCE 3X cooler make less noise than the older ones due to improvements in design and the declining TDP rating for NVIDIA GPUs. It’s also important to note that the GTX 970 and GTX 960 cards we reviewed from Gigabyte have very slightly different coolers fitted despite both being branded as “WINDFORCE 3X”. For this reason we’ll talk about each cooler first then move on to the common features.
GTX970 G1 Gaming 4GD WINDFORCE 3X Cooler
This is a hefty cooler – it’s long, our sample measuring in at 295mm but not overly tall. The black metal fan shroud and back plate form what looks like a protective cage about the GTX 970 which makes the changes of damaging it during installation less than some other cards. The cooler is not suitable for slot-to-slot SLI (without a single slot gap in between) as the 43mm width of the card restricts airflow. Whilst not likely to be an issue for ATX motherboards, it’s a consideration for M-ATX boards that needs to be highlighted.
The design looks great aesthetically and makes the G1 Gaming GTX 970 effectively a black video card – the blue “WINDFORCE” LED on the top can be controlled via software to pulse, flash, brighten with load or temperature. If you really, really don’t want any blue light in your rig for aesthetic reasons, you can turn it off but we thought it looked pretty good and set off the other blue LEDs in our Cooler Master Cosmos SE build nicely.
The GTX 970 WINDFORCE 3X cooler is different to the one we saw on the GTX 960 G1 Gaming edition but not significantly. The cooler fitted to the GTX 970 has about 21 smaller heat sink fins, no stop/silent LEDs and makes slightly more noise on the open test bench. Once inside a case, the noise profile is about the same and it’s very difficult to hear the GTX 970 G1 Gaming at idle / low graphics loads when installed inside a case. At load, the cooler is audible but not offensively loud. On startup, the cooler will let out a bit of a ‘whoosh’ until windows loads and the fan profile kicks in – this is consistent with previous WINDFORCE coolers that we’ve seen and probably a strategy to clear out dust when booting your gaming beast.
Heatpipes, fin stack and fan design
The WINDFORCE 3X has pure copper heat-pipes that come into direct contact with the GPU to enhance the heat transfer. The fins are well spaced to allow airflow from the 3x80mm fans to pass over them in a downward manner onto the PCB and then away from the card. The heat sink fins are somewhat reflective as well and likely to give a nice ambient effect if your case has a horizontal/flat motherboard mount orientation and internal LEDs.
The fans are shaped to reduce the noise level with a reduction in turbulence while directing the air at the heatpipes and fin stack.
We were able to overclock the GTX 970 GPU to 1501MHz without the fan speed exceeding 58% or the temperature going beyond 68C so we’re happy to call that a win for the cooler.
GTX960 G1 Gaming 2GD WINDFORCE 3X Cooler
Interestingly, the GTX 960 G1 Gaming WINDFORCE 3X cooler is different to its GTX 970 sibling in that it has more surface area in the heat sink with about 21 taller fins at the trailing end of the card, it also has the stop/silent lights and doesn’t spin right up on boot. The external dimensions are the same as the GTX 970 card but by GTX 960 standards, it makes for a longer graphics card than average by about 40mm.
The major difference to the GTX 970 G1 Gaming is that the fans on the GTX 960 G1 Gaming card actually stop at idle – making the card dead silent. When the fans stop, there are two blue LEDs on the top edge of the card either side of the “WINDFORCE” logo that light up, one reads “SILENT”, the other reads “STOP”. When we installed this card into a build, it was handy because without the LEDs to tell us, it was hard to determine when the fans were running or not due to the low noise profile of the graphics card. It didn’t register on our decibel meter under auto settings in testing. In all other ways, it just appears to be a slightly scaled down version of the cooler we saw on the GTX 970 G1 Gaming.
To avoid confusion, the rest of the features are applicable to both cards
Flex Display technology
In basic terms, this is the intelligent grouping of monitors to make multi-screen gaming easier. Gigabyte explain it as:
“GIGABYTE Flex display technology (patent-pending) can automatically detect any connected monitors and achieve multi-display gaming up to 4 monitors at the same time by using various output groups. Users could enjoy the best gaming experience in ultra HD resolution with extended flexibility in arranging monitor configurations and making future system upgrade extremely easy.”
Ultra Durable VGA
Gigabyte has trademarked “Ultra Durable VGA” and if my own GTX 670 OC cards in SLI are a good indication, we have no reason to doubt the part selection or durability. Gigabyte proudly promote that they use a 2oz copper PCB, solid capacitors, Tier 1 Samsung/Hynix, lower Resistance(drain-to-source) MOSFET and Ferrite Core chokes to provide reduced voltage ripples, higher overclocking, less impedance, lower temperatures and more stable running.
The G1 Gaming series cards also have Dual BIOS. This appears to be as a safety measure in case one of them becomes corrupted. We couldn’t find any way of manually choosing which BIOS to use. BIOS tweaking isn’t something we get into but it is nice to know that if you do have an issue applying a BIOS update to a G1 Gaming card, there is a fallback BIOS there to help prevent you bricking your card.
OC GURU II
I’ve been using MSI Afterburner on non-MSI cards for years and it’s been my go-to application for graphics card tweaking.
Gigabyte’s OC GURU II is a serviceable application that allows you to create 5 profiles and tweak the settings of your card to overclock it to its potential. You can easily set voltage, fan profiles, temperature or power targets and tune the GPU and Memory Clocks.
Packaging
The packaging is sturdy and the card comes well protected with a thin plastic film over the fan housing, in an anti-static bag and secured in custom cut out foam. All contact points have opaque blue soft plastic covers. There is a small box of accessories placed under the graphics card that contains:
- Driver CD
- Reference Guide
- MOLEX to 6/8pin adapters
We like consistency here and the two products are packaged the same with very similar coolers making them easy to confuse visually. That’s where the confusion ends. When we installed them into the test bench and ran them through their paces it became clear very early on that these were two very different beasts.
