GIGABYTE GTX 570 Super Overclock – Preview

Seems like everything we care about as overclockers is being delayed of late. In fact just about everything this year has been delayed. 3DMark11, Bulldozer, X79, Ivy Bridge, and now the next generation of graphics cards based on the 28nm node are also suffering the same fate. So we are stuck with the 500 series for at least 6 more months.

Disappointing no doubt, but there is an upside and that is we just may see the most refined, overclocker tuned or geared graphics cards yet. After all, with the impending release of the EVGA GTX580 Classified, one has to suspect that others will go back to the drawing board and re-release their enthusiast grade cards. What we have here though isn’t, if you will, a second generation GTX 570. It’s rather GIGABYTE’s Super Overclock GTX570.

As you would expect it’s a completely different PCB than on their previous OC models. This one features a similar if not identical cooler to the GTX 580, a 12 phase PWM system and a healthy overclock from the reference model. At 842MHz on the core, it’s surprisingly much faster than the standard model despite the seemingly modest overclock. The memory has not been touched and remains at 3,800MHz, a pity given that we were able to overclock the memory to a respectable 4,800MHz. With that said, there wasn’t much gained from this, in fact game tests gained one or two frames per second at the most, and in the case of 3DMark11, we gained 10 points which is to say nothing at all. Still if you’re one using a fair level of AA this added bandwidth will come in handy. Where the core speed is concerned, 945MHz was the limit using just 1.05V from the default 0.98V. At this speed, the memory bandwidth makes more of a difference and a sizeable boost in performance can be observed and in fact at this clock it’s pretty much faster or equal to any GTX580 you can find on the market.

Here are a few benchmarks for you, looking good for sure.

Air testing won’t really tell one anything about sub-zero overclocking and we’ll cover that in the full review in issue 16, for now, the GTX 570 Super Overclock is impressive as far as 570 GPUs are concerned. It’s not a perfect card as we’d have appreciated clearly labelled voltage measuring points, and the dual BIOS system found on the 580 SOC, but given the price point we are not surprised that these features are missing. GIGABYTE’s OC-GURU is functional but certainly nowhere near as functional as MSI’s Afterburner which as you guessed works well with this card, has a smaller footprint and is just more compact.

Overall this is looking good, look to the full review in the next issue with all the games like 3DMark Vantage you feed on. 😉