In the SFF world, the bane of our existence is heat. We find many creative ways to exhaust the watts of heat our hardware put out, from adding extra vents to crazy fan combinations. Constantly fighting us, however, is the general trend of GPU manufacturers insisting that having open style coolers on the cards is a good thing. All this does is add even more heat to our already sauna-like systems.
Gigabyte has blown this trend with a new card – the GV-N970TTOC-4GD – with a blower style cooler! The Gigabyte GTX970 Twin Turbo has a blower fan which pulls air from both sides of the card, utilising the short 970 PCB. All this air, suitably heated by the GTX970’s 150 watts of heat, is exhausted out of the rear of the case. This has the added benefit of acting as an exhaust fan, pulling warm air from inside the chassis too.
No words on noise level yet, so we can’t judge the viability of this design, but with the lower restriction of inlets on both sides of the card, we can expect it to be at least a little quieter than the jet engines of old.
The card includes 4GB of GDDR5, and sports a Dual-Link DVI-I port, a HDMI port and 3 Displayports. The GPU core runs at 1101 MHz in OC mode, with a boost to 1241MHz. In Gaming mode, the card will run at 1076MHz with boost to 1216MHz. Gigabyte states that the system needs a power supply of at least 400w, with one 8 pin GPU power connector.
Availability and price are yet to be revealed.
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