Xtreme Gaming, that’s what Gigabyte calls its new flagship graphics cards. All the pixel accelerators which belong to this series features a powerful cooler, a complex PCB and a beefy factory OC. This sounds like an interesting combination and we’re certainly curious to find out what this card can do on the following pages.
With the GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming Gigabyte has an exquisite GTX 970 based card in its portfolio. For this graphics card, Gigabyte makes use of a custom PCB along with a new version of their Windforce 3X cooler. On the backside of the card, there is a good looking backplate. A quick glance at the specs also reveals that this card ships heavily factory overclocked.
Browsing the specifications of this card we find 1664 CUDA cores, 104 TMUs and 64 ROPs. Looking at the clock speeds of this monster we find 1’190 MHz base clock and 1’342 MHz boost clock, whereas the NVIDIA reference cards run at 1051MHz/1178MHz, therefore there is a massive 13.9% factory overclock on the GPU.
As we already mentioned, Gigabyte decided to use a significant factory-overclock on their new GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming. While the reference GTX 970 is set to work at 1051 MHz for the base clock and 1178 MHz for the GPU boost clock, the GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming runs at 1’190 MHz base clock and 1’342 MHz boost clock.
When it comes to memory clock speeds we see a slight, almost 100 MHz frequency boost, which makes the chips run at 7096 MHz. Combine this with a 256 Bit memory interface and you end up with a total of 227.1 Gigabyte of memory bandwidth.
Whereas the typical boost clock is set at 1’342 MHz, the maximum boost of 1’417 MHz was achieved quite easily and the GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming held that clock most of the load time due to the capable Windforce 3X cooler as well as good TDP target (nVidia’s Boost technology being power-based and not temperature-based on this card).
| Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming | GeForce GTX 970 | GeForce GTX 770 | |
| Chip | GM204 Maxwell | GM204 Maxwell | GK104 Kepler |
| Process | 28 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm |
| Transistors | 5.20 billion | 5.20 billion | 3.54 billion |
| GPU clock | 1’190 MHz | 1’051 MHz | 1’046 MHz |
| GPU Boost clock | 1’342 MHz | 1’178 MHz | 1’085 MHz |
| Memory GDDR5 | 4’096 MB | 4’096 MB | 2’048 MB |
| Memory clock | 1’774 (7’096) MHz | 1’750 (7’000) MHz | 1’750 (7’000) MHz |
| Memory interface | 256 Bit | 256 Bit | 256 Bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 227’100 MB/s | 224’000 MB/s | 224’000 MB/s |
| Shader Cores | 1’664 | 1’664 | 1’536 |
| TMUs | 104 | 104 | 128 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 32 |
| TDP | >150 Watt | 150 Watt | 230 Watt |
| PCB Type | Custom Design | Reference Design | Reference Design |
| Slots | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Cooler | Gigabyte WindForce 3X | NVIDIA Reference | NVIDIA Reference |
| Launch Price | 392€ | $299 | $399 |