Gigabyte Windforce OC 970

[Bhavv]

Hi, Im just going to make this thread now and post info / benchmarks / pictures as I get around to doing them.

This is the cheaper non G1 version Gigabyte card, I got mine for £275 each:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-g...-3x-dp-1x-dvi-

Firstly I wanted to share this from my first stability test with everything at stock settings:



My cards seem to be boosting from 1114 Mhz to 1316 Mhz, not the advertised 1253 Mhz, I think I might have struck gold with getting these cards at £25 less per card compared to the G1

There are some physical differences to the G1 though, firstly theres no backplate, the Windforce logo doesnt lightup, and the heatsink only has two heatpipes compared to the G1's 4. But the cooling still seems plenty adequate, and mine at least seem to have a very good stock boost clock.

ASIC quality on my cards is 67% / 70%.

Also for some reason, they destroyed my Antec HCP 1300w when I first installed them, but now they are working fine on my XFX 850w black edition, so that was completely weird. Going to need to RMA my Antec PSU now.

OMG is this right? Is this normal?



Looping Unigine Valley ... 1500 Mhz on stock voltage??????????????????? <70 degrees???????

Maximum clocks on stock volts:



+230 became unstable. The ram was artifacting slightly at +450. Turned it down to +400 and it is artifact free now. So my max clocks are 1541 mhz core / 7800 mhz ram, very lovely.

[Domestic_Ginger]

Can you increase the polling rate in rivatuner?

If your scores are good then they look really good to me,how's the noise?

[SHOGUNXSHINOBI]

Thats a nice oc, are you doing that with both the cards or are you testing 1 by 1.

[Bhavv]

Thats with both the cards, you can see GPU1 and GPU2 are OCed.

Heres the pictures of the cards:









The exposed PCB on the back actually looks nice through the side window, the one reason I never used to buy gigabyte cards before was they always used ugly blue PCBs, but now they've finally started using black.

[Bhavv]

Ok, mine werent stable during gaming at 1500 Mhz stock volts, only for benching.

I found out why overvolting wasnt helping much, because when you set +87mV, it also increases the GPU overclock by about 10-15 Mhz, which was causing more instability.

So instead of running +200 on the core clock, I had to reduce it to +185 with +0.87mV voltage:



I then got a stable 1500 Mhz and also 8000 Mhz on the ram without any artifacts!

Those temps were after I had been gaming for a while, then a triple loop of Valley to make sure it was stable, going to loop firemark extreme next for more stress, hopefully these clocks will be 24/7 stable now.

[Bhavv]

And this is a 20 minute torture test running Firemark Extreme combined test:



My new conclusion is that the Windforce OC is fine for 1500 Mhz, and likely on par with the Asus Strix and MSI Gaming, but if you want to try to push even higher than that, you will want the Gigabyte G1,

The fans went a lot higher than 48% btw, but it didnt show under fan speed.

[jasjeet]

What was the noise like and fan percentages in:
Gaming stock?
Gaming stock voltage overclocked?
Gaming max voltage max oc?