Gigabyte GTX 760 Windforce 2GB Review

In this review we are going to be looking at the Gigabyte GTX 760 Windforce to the test. The GTX 760 is one of the newer cards to be released by Nvidia, and is the natural successor to the 660.

The GTX 760 uses Kepler 28nm architecture, it features Nvidia’s GPU Boost 2.0 technology which allows adaptive overclocking of the card so when the card can it will run even faster, the 2.0 improves over the original boost technology, It also benefits from Nvidia Surround technology which allows you to have up to four monitors running from one card whilst also coming complete with Nvidia Adaptive V-Sync , the card also features cornerstone technology from Nvidia such as 3D Vision and PhysX so again like the 670 you won’t miss out on anything important.

Specification

Onward, onto the specifications of this particular 760, much like the 670 reviewed earlier this week, Gigabyte have gone down the route of including a non-standard cooler to keep this card cool under load, being ever so slightly different in that it uses three fans instead of the two that the Asus used, this as per the Asus card should offer improvements over the stock cooler in both noise and cooling potential, as it also has a heat pipe based design, which uses a Gigabytes patent pending Triangle cool technology, which aims to reduce turbulence between the fans to increase the efficiency of the heat transfer, much like the Asus card the heat pipes directly touch to Graphics processing unit again this aims to improve the overall performance of the cooler.

The Gigabyte Windforce card we are looking at is overclocked by the manufacturer from stock, so that rather than a base core clock of 980MHz and a Boost clock of 1033Mhz, this card features a base core clock of 1085Mhz and a boost of 1150Mhz, this may not seem like much, but in graphics cards a little can go a long way. For the memory and other the card uses the same speed as the normal 760 with the memory running at a rate of an effective 6GHz

The card comes in a box to match its size; it goes into a bit of detail about the specifications of the graphics card as well as talking about the cooling unit, it also lists the requirements of the card which are a 1x6Pin and 1x8Pin connection with a requirement of 30Amps and a minimum of 500W or more (depending on the rest of the hardware).

Whats On / In the Box

The card comes in a box to match its size; it goes into a bit of detail about the specifications of the graphics card as well as talking about the cooling unit, it also lists the requirements of the card which are a 1x6Pin and 1x8Pin connection with a requirement of 30Amps and a minimum of 500W or more (depending on the rest of the hardware)

The box contains another box, which is designed like a presentation box with the Gigabyte embossed in silver lettering; this second box contains the card, I initially thought there were no accessories until I removed the card and saw a little slot under the graphics card which hides the included accessories. The accessories Gigabyte nicely include in the package are a utility disc (includes OC Guru II software and driver) a 2xMolex to 6Pin connector and a 2xMolex to 8Pin Connector, lastly a quick installation guide is also provided.

The Card

I have to say I liked the look of this card a lot, the 3 fans are partially transparent which means that you can see the heat sink of the cooler, reflecting through into the machine, they are also evenly spaced across the width of the heatsink so no area will be left un-cooled especially with the shroud surrounding the cooler being designed to aim the air over every part of the card.