At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking this is a passive cooling design however, there are actually 3 fans hidden beneath the exposed aluminium fins of the heatsink. The main heatsink is framed by a glossy plastic shroud which looks great, especially with the white highlights; 'Gainward' and 'Phantom'. The shroud does however attract unwanted fingerprints thanks to its black mirror like appearance.


Sadly, the rear of the PCB features no backplate which is a shame for a card costing well over £600. To make matters worse, the PCB is not a pure black either. Instead what we get is a dark brown. Thankfully, this will not really be noticeable when installed in a PC enclosure.


From this angle you can see just how thick the card is. While not classified as 'triple slot' in that it is 2.5x slot width in use it will take up 3 slots of space on the motherboard.


Perhaps one of the best designs on the GPU cooling market at present is the ability of the user to remove fans from the Gainward Phantom card without removing the heatsink or shroud. This makes cleaning both the heatsink and individual fans very easy with the minimal of fuss thanks to just 3 thumbscrews holding the slot loading fans in place.


The card looks longer than it is because of the longitudinal fins however it is just 5mm longer than reference design at 27cm.


The I/O area is standard NVIDIA with DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI 1.4a and a DisplayPort 1.2 available allowing support for four concurrent displays.


As with all GTX780s, the Gainward Phantom variety affords us two SLI tabs meaning multiple cards can be linked from the same GeForce family.


the power requirements of the card are PSU capable of 600W with a 42A rating on the 12v line. It should also be noted that while Gainward provide an 8pin-MOLEX adaptor, your PSU will need a further 6 pins power cable to provide power for this card thanks to the 6+8pin power ports.