Gigabyte GTX780 WindForce OC Graphics Card Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell August 28, 2013 Featured Tech Reviews, Graphics

We have seen this artwork from Gigabyte before on other products – the all seeing blue neon eye. Not sure it makes any sense, but it looks nice. No picture of the card on the front but the cooler is exposed on the rear.

Our review sample had no accessories bundled, but we received an engineering sample direct from the factory. The retail bundle contains a CD and two 8 pin power converter cables.

The Gigabyte GTX780 WindForce OC is a heavy card and it looks mean. The black cooler with three black fans is attractive and matches the PCB. This is a dual slot solution. The card is 280 mm long, so it will fit inside most full sized enthusiast grade chassis released today. The card would definitely have looked better with a Gigabyte branded backplate. It wouldn't have added much to the overall cost either.

The Gigabyte GTX780 WindForce OC graphics card takes power from two 8 pin PCI power connectors.

The GTX780 is SLI capable in 2 and 3 way configurations. In theory you could run 4 of these cards in SLI with the dual connector heads however Nvidia have limited the GTX780 to a 3 way SLI setup. The GTX Titan however can be run in 4 way SLI, a deliberate move by Nvidia. Be prepared to dig deep into that bank balance if you want to run either GTX780 or GTX Titan in SLI.

The card has two DVI ports, a single DisplayPort and a single HDMI port. All outputs can be used simultaneously, so triple monitor gaming is possible with only one card. HDMI is supported by audio, it is HDMI 1.4a compatible.

The cooler is substantial – with 5 very thick copper heatpipes running through the copper base plate and along the full length of the aluminium fins. Personally I like the style of this cooler, as it keeps the heatpipes completely straight along the full length of the card.

An overview of the GTX780 WindForce OC in GPUz. The GTX780 GK110 is built on the 28nm process. It has 48 ROP's and 192 TMU's. The 3GB of GDDR5 (1,500mhz/6Gbps effective) memory is connected via a 384 bit memory interface. The Gigabyte GTX780 WindForce OC has been overclocked from reference core speeds of 863mhz to 954mhz.