Grey is not the new black...
GIGABYTE manufacture everything from motherboards to speakers, mice and everything else in between. Something that they've also been making for a while are graphics cards; traditionally made with the bright blue PCB that the company has become famous for, bundled with a decent game and a nice aftermarket cooler to sweeten the deal. The company's taken a step back from this type of very handy card to give something that is a little bare, designed precisely to the reference spec and not a dot over that. Pricewise it commands a curious $50 premium over the likes of HIS, Sapphire and Manli - so what exactly warrants the price bump?
For starters you get a very cool sticker on the card, if you happen to like things that are aesthetically unpleasing. If you're anything like us however you'll think that this card is pretty garish, and even though it uses the reference cooler the subtle design seems marred by the superfluous amounts of grey. Still, the design itself is pretty solid underneath the Sticker of UnpleasantnessTM, sporting a capable heatsink with a large squirrel-cage fan that pulls cool air from inside the case, channelling it through the shroud (and heatsink within), finally exhausting most of the air out the rear of the case (though some remains inside the case). This restricted exhaust is due to the disproportionately small vent on the expansion bracket, as the space is shared with two DVI sockets, HDMI and DisplayPort. Having the capacity for three displays at once is pretty neat, and AMD's Eyefinity tech definitely seems to be one to have a play with.
The card is able to power that many screens at once thanks to the processing grunt afforded by the RV870 core running inside; manufactured on a slim 40nm process, it's got a complement of 1600 shader units that hook up to 1GB of GDDR5 memory through a 256-bit wide memory bus. These specs are definitely the benchmark level for higher-end graphics tech for the next few months, and they're not set to be challenged by the competition for quite some time yet. Being manufactured on such a small process also gives the die a relatively small 334mm2, and considering the amount of processing cores included it's impressive that more space wasn't wasted.
Overclocking went smoothly enough, with a twelve per cent increase on the core clockspeed to 950MHz (from 850MHz). Memory clocks remained pretty standard, increasing nine per cent to 1310MHz (5240MHz effective). Temperatures were to be expected for a reference card; idling at 48 degrees with a very quiet 51.2dBA and increasing to 71 degrees with 60.5dBA under load.
Performance within games is identical to what can be expected from the RV870 core. In other words, it provides an imminently playable experience over both the games used to test, and returns respectable scores in both 3DMark benchmark programs. Considering that the core comes with DX11 support built-in for future games this is very tempting, and it's also backwards compatible with all other DirectX versions.
Unfortunately for GIGABYTE it hasn't followed its usual route and included a game with the card, nor a better cooler. While the PCB for the card is manufactured with its 2oz copper, which supposedly reduces temperatures and improves signal quality (technically helping clockspeeds), the manufacturing costs added by that process wouldn't add that much to the retail price. GIGABYTE has a decent warranty on its cards, but we can only really recommend this card if all your favourite stores have run out of stock on the cheaper reference models.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012