NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 series has taken the enthusiast market by storm, and Gigabyte's GTX 980 G1 Gaming is no exception. The card comes with a large overclock out of the box for a 8% performance increase over the reference design. This gives the card a 20% performance advantage over the R9 290X and one of 15% over the GTX 780 Ti. I only wish Gigabyte had also overclocked the memory for some extra performance. As our manual overclocking tests show, the chips can certainly take it.
Gigabyte's Windforce 3X cooler uses three fans that have been paired with six heatpipes and a copper baseplate to keep the card cool. Just like with all other GTX 980 cards we have tested thus far, temperatures are excellent. Unlike other custom cards, Gigabyte's cooler does not extend beyond the height of a PCIe slot, which could be a deciding factor in some very small cases. While the cooler does well cooling-wise, its noise levels leave something to be desired. In idle, the cooler runs very quiet, but it does not completely stop its fans like ASUS's, MSI's and Palit's cards. During heavy gaming, noise output is higher than on any other GTX 980 we have tested before. While still much quieter than the Radeon R9 290X, the difference to the quietest custom GTX 980s is huge. Given temperatures are not significantly improved, I'm having a hard time recommending the G1 Gaming to low-noise gamers. Gigabyte has included a backplate with their card, and it looks and feels great as it is actually one of the best built baseplates I've encountered so far.
In terms of overclocking, we see excellent OC potential that reaches 1370 MHz on the GPU and a staggering 2055 MHz on the memory. Gigabyte markets their card with "GPU Gauntlet sorting", promising that only the best-overclocking GPUs make it onto the GTX 980 G1; however, other GTX 980s by other companies we have tested reach similar clocks. Our power consumption testing shows that Gigabyte has increased the power limit of their card to 340 W, which will prove useful to hardcore overclockers and voltmodders as they will have that additional power headroom they might require.
What is truly unique on the Gigabyte card, though, is the monitor output configuration. Gigabyte has crammed three DisplayPorts, two DVI ports, and an HDMI port onto their board, which is more than anyone else. Since the GTX 980 GPU can not support that many outputs at the same time, Gigabyte added a TMDS switch chip that automatically decides how to route these outputs. This could prove useful to gamers with exotic monitor output configurations, or as a means to simplify connectivity. I am not yet completely convinced it is worth the extra cost, though.
Currently retailing at $630, the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming is definitely not cheap. I find a $80 price premium over the reference design hard to justify, especially when custom cards by other manufacturers retail at around the $580 mark. Nevertheless, you'll definitely be a happy gamer with the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1, which would also be the case with another GTX 980, or a GTX 970.