GIGABYTE G1 GAMING
900 SERIES
MAXWELL’S FAMILY THREE
Hardware Award
L
ast issue, I looked at another
GTX 980 graphics card.
One built specifically for
competitive overclocking and
commanding a high price for that.
I still believe that is the best
overclocking GTX 980 on the
market and a recent achievement
by overclocker Steponz proved this
yet again with a scorching GPU core
clock speed of 2.3GHz resulting in a
3DMark FireStrike Extreme score
of 10,459. That has not changed and
that graphics card will likely remain
unbeaten for some time.
As impressive and inspiring as
that is, the 99.9% of us will never
come close to even attempting that
and what we look for in our graphics
card is game performance above
all else. Sure, we do appreciate
overclocking, but for Joe Soap, that
is out of reach and limits closer to
what can be achieved via air cooling
will be ever more relevant. As such I
managed to gather three
of the G1 Gaming cards from
GIGABYTE’s NVIDIA 900 series
GPUs. These represent the premier
GPUs from the vendor and it goes
without saying that they command a
price premium over the WindForce
18 The OverClocker Issue 33 | 2015
and all other editions.
In this tough market, an average
aftermarket cooler will not suffice
and that goes for a mediocre
overclock as well. A constant
balance between these two and
other factors is what ultimately
determines many a buying decision
only secondary to price. Since no
GPU here is under $200, they have
to allow at the very least gaming at
Full HD resolutions with all
settings set to their highest levels
barring anti-aliasing. Not an unfair
expectation given that a current
generation gaming console is $299
and the graphics are pretty
impressive there. So for $200 and
above on a single component, one
should be able to reach the same
graphical fidelity at the very least.
It is safe to say that all three
GPUs are capable of this and in
the case of the G1 cards, they
are able to exceed this minimum
requirement quite well. Before I
begin with each other, I will cover
some basics that are common to
more than one card, specifically the
Flex Display technology and the
Coolers on each card.
GIGABYTE’S FLEX-DISPLAY
TECHNOLOGY
Normally the GTX 900 GPUs wold
have three display ports (1.2), one
HDMI (2.0) and a single DVI port.
True to all other G1 cards from this
generation, GIGABYTE has found
it fit to install an additional TMDS on
their boards allowing one to use up
to four displays simultaneously.
Normally this isn’t possible as the
GTX 900 cards will only allow for a
maximum of three, but with the G1
cards you may utilize a combination
of two DVI ports, a single DisplayPort
and an HDMI port. Alternatively you
may use a single DVI-I, all three
Display Ports or the HDMI port as
well. The usage case for this
configuration is limited in my opinion
on lower end cards, but that it is
there can’t hurt. For productivity
suits and video walls this will
definitely come in handy as it should
allow for all
(non-accessory) displays to output a
4K signal. This should allow plenty of
desktop real-estate for whatever
you may be using your GPU for.