14 DAY TRIAL // The GeForce GTX 770 graphics card from NVIDIA is one of those less-than-ordinary adapters that its maker allows to be modified, instead of ordering OEMs to stick to reference blueprints for a while.
Taking advantage of this, Gigabyte has created the GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X, which has more than the special cooler going for it.
Indeed, while the cooler plays a great part in achieving the higher performance, it is, nonetheless, just one custom feature.
Gigabyte also took liberties with the PCB (printed circuit board). It had to, otherwise it wouldn't have managed to include 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM instead of the standard 2 GB memory.
There are sixteen 2 Gb memory chips in total, eight of them on the reverse side of the PCB.
The WindForce 3X cooler doesn't reach there, since the newcomer doesn't have a back plate, but the cooler does chill the GPU, the front-side memory and VRM better than NVIDIA's reference, single-fan model.
Speaking of fan number, WindForce 3X has three (obviously) of 80 mm in diameter. The spinners dissipate the heat spread over the two aluminum fin stacks, and brought there by six copper heatpipes.
As for the actual specifications, they are as follows: 1,137 MHz base GPU speed (versus reference 1,046 MHz), 1,189 MHz GPU Boost 2.0 (vs. 1,085 MHz), 7,010 MHz memory clock speed (the same as default) and an interface of 256 bits. The memory bandwidth ended up at 224 GB/s.
The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X might run a bit hot, due to all the pushes, but the cooler should manage to keep temperatures below 80°C.
The price is of around $499.99 / €499.99, although luck might help one find listings for $449 / €449. It depends on the retailer and the tags of all other NVIDIA cards selling through that online store, and AMD alternatives for that matter.
