14 DAY TRIAL // Even though the GTX 580 is supposedly on the way, Gigabyte seems quite eager to quickly enforce its hold over the enthusiast market, its method being the marketing of the GTX 480 Super Overclock, which has now headed to Europe.
The GeForce GTX 480 Super Oveclock is, essentially, Gigabyte's currently most powerful video card powered by NVIDIA's GF100 graphics processing unit.
As end-users may or may not know, the GTX480 was the card that let NVIDIA reclaim the single-GPU graphics card performance crown when it came out.
Unfortunately, enthusiasts could not easily overclock it to very great heights because it had both a high power draw and a significant heat generation.
Still, hardware makers did not let that alone dissuade them from trying, and Gigabyte eventually managed to significantly push the GF100 higher.
The card it designed is the aforementioned GTX 480 Super Overclock and has the GF100 running at 820 MHz, a fair bit above the stock 700 MHz.
The board has many other modifications, however as well, such as a shader clock of 1,640 MHz instead of 1,401 MHz, and a memory clock of 3,800 MHz for the 1,5GB of GDDR5 VRAM (stock has 3,696 MHz).
Gigabyte also implemented a 12+2 phase power design, dual BIOS (SOC and LN2), 480 CUDA cores and, of course, a significantly stronger cooler.
The cooler is a dual-slot solution, with three fans, known as the WindForce 3X. Finally, video output is possible via dual-DVI and HDMI outputs.
According to a report, this model should soon begin selling in Europe, where it has supposedly shown up as available for pre-order already, priced at 437.55 Euro.
It will be interesting to see how this beast fares on a market poised to soon welcome another behemoth, namely NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 580, which was pictured not too long ago.