Gainward GeForce GTX 770 Phantom OC 2GB Review

With this being the first card we’ve had from Gainward, we would of course have our reservations, as we wouldn’t know what to expect from a reviewer or consumers point of view. Now that we’ve had it under the microscope, we can’t find any issue with it at all, barring the small issues with the packaging, but the card overall was simply amazing.

Design wise, it’s nice to see a fresh approach at things, instead of these “samey” cards that we’re seeing in blue and black, or black and red. The Phantom cooler definitely gives the eyes something different to focus on and the performance keeps up its end of the bargain too with extremely low acoustics, even at load and with temperatures where we expected, you won’t see this card push over 80 degrees, even under the most extreme circumstances, as we saw today when we pushed it to its limits, but lets talk more about stock performance before we mention the crazy overclock speeds that we managed to hit.

When looking at the performance straight out of the box, you can see that the Phantom was at the top of the stack, almost hitting the performance of the GTX 780 on certain benchmarks, and at certain resolutions. Of course with our tweaks and overclocks that we saw on the last page, we’d be confident of getting even closer, if not surpassing those results, and for a fraction of the cost. No one can grumble at that, can they?

Overclocking was something that actually really surprised me, as I was expecting good things, like we’ve seen with other GTX 770 cards, but nothing near what we were able to get today, though I was hoping to hit the magic 2000MHz on the memory, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be, but with a good chassis and cooling setup, this may be possible, but in our open-air Lian Li T60 test bench, it was unachievable, but with speeds of 1225MHz on the core and 1990MHz on the memory, it’s not something to moan about and has actually amazed us quite a bit.

I started this review saying about how this card is around £30/$46 more expensive than a reference GTX 770 at £359.99 from Overclockers UK and wanting to see if that extra money could be justified over a consumer buying a regular model and in all honestly, I think that £30 is actually underpricing this card. I believe that consumers would be willing to even pay slightly more for a card of this calibre, as it really does tick all of the right boxes, with an amazing cooling solution which is able to stay quiet, even under load, whilst keeping temperatures within safe limits. Sure it uses slightly more power, but with a design like this one, you’d expect that anyway.

If you’re in the market for a GTX 770 or even a GTX 780, this would be the card I’d be looking at, as if you don’t mind a little bit of tweaking to push the card to its limit, you will find that the core and memory don’t mind being pushed to their limits and getting extra performance for free is always welcomed in this day and age, when money is everything and every little helps.

For our first time working with Gainward, it’s been a pleasant one, and if the GTX 770 Phantom is anything to go by, I’m very keen to see what other models they have up their sleeve with more 700 series cards coming from Nvidia in the near future, but for now we need to keep quiet on that one.

Pros

• Design is refreshing to see
• Cool, even under load
  
• Remains quiet throughout
• Removable fans are a welcome addition
• Huge GPU overclock straight out of the box
• Two SLI connectors
• Huge overclocking potential
• Extra money is well worth it

Cons

• Stock memory speed
  

eTeknix Says: If you’re in the market for a GTX 770, the Phantom from Gainward is definitely worth paying the extra bucks for, and if you’re looking for a GTX 780, you’ll find the overclocking potential of this card far outweighs the price of a stock GTX 780 with similar results throughout testing.

Thanks to Gainward for providing this review sample.