14 DAY TRIAL // As we said yesterday (May 23, 2013), NVIDIA has officially launched the GeForce GTX 780 graphics adapter, which means that its many OEMs have one or more custom-made models up for order as well. Gigabyte is among the few that did not just take the reference card and slap their logo sticker on top of the cooler shroud.
True, the company does have a reference-clocked and cooler GTX 780, but that comes with the territory of being a partner.
Nevertheless, Gigabyte has also introduced the GTX 780 WindForce OC, also known by its part number GV-N780OC-3GD.
Instead of the normal clock speeds of 863 MHz base and 900 MHz GPU Boost 2.0, it operates at 954 MHz and 1,006 MHz, respectively.
The WindForce 3X cooler is used because of the additional cooling performance required by the factory overclocking.
The performance of the 3 GB of GDDr5 VRAM is left untouched (6,008 MHz).
In fact, the higher GPU speed is the only change. Gigabyte elected to retain the standard card PCB, so there aren't any special capacitors or other parts.
The rest of the feature set is what prospective buyers may have already memorized: a 384-bit memory interface, OpenGL 4.3 support, and four video outputs (dual-DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort).
We're not sure what the price is. It's probably around the $650 mark. Then again, reference-design based GV-N780D5-3GD-B will cost about that much. NVIDIA provided the tags of $649 in the US, €539 in most European countries, and £549 in the United Kingdom.
By that logic, the GTX 780 WindForce OC (GV-N780OC-3GD) would sell for a bit more, as required by the special cooling system. In the end, it will depend on the retailer, e-tailer and shipping costs.
Stay tuned for other GTX 780 boards, both reference and non-reference. There are quite a few of them out and about now.