When I first got word that the GIGABYTE GTX570 'Super Overclock' was to land on my desk I will confess I wasn't overly excited. Sure, I liked the WindForce cooler of the GTX560 we reviewed previously but another remix of the GTX570, another factory overclocked card? Do we really need another hero as Tina Turner would ask? Well do we?

It's a tough one to answer truth be told. At £300 the GIGABYTE GTX570 is almost into vanilla GTX580 territory and that may be enough to put most people off. Hero or not, the Super Overclock version of the GTX570 is certainly in the high end price bracket so to mix it with the heavyweights it will have to punch well above what a standard GTX570 can achieve before it even begins to tempt prospective buyers.



I was blown away by the cooling design which is nothing short of exceptional and a credit to GIGABYTE as out of all the cards I have tested this year, the GIGABYTE WindForce cooler is the best aftermarket solution by a country mile. It kept the card very cool, even when pushed to its limit but best of all; it did so in relative silence. Compare this to a stock NVIDIA reference cooler and it is like comparing chalk to cheese, they are that far apart. For that reason alone it should be worthy of consideration over a stock GTX580, especially if noise levels, or rather a lack of them are high on your list of priorities.

The packaging was sublime and should ensure your new purchase arrives without so much as a scratch, you may however feel a little short changed with the accessories. While this package has the basics, for such an inflated high price, I would have liked to have seen an included game at the very least. Other manufacturers add in a mouse mat, or other 'freebies' but with the GIGBAYTE card, you only get what is par for the course I'm afraid.

The graphics card itself is a stunner. The WindForce cooler not only acts cool but it looks cool too. My only reservation is the blue PCB. This is fine for your run of the mill graphics cards but I would like to have seen something special here to distinguish it from the basic GIGABYTE cards. Some very pleasing eye candy has been produced by GIGABYTE of late with their colour co-ordinated motherboards which it has to be said, look great whatever your preference so one would hope this eventually transfers to the graphics card department in the near future.

Finally, we get to the performance of the card. As expected it performed very well throughout our tests. What I did find surprising is it actually bettered the overclocked MSI GTX580 on numerous occasions which is a fantastic achievement! Sadly, the card proved to be less than successful when the highest resolutions and filters were applied in certain games, namely Metro 2033 which brought the card to its knees due to severe VRAM limitations. Thankfully it was rare where we ran into VRAM limitations but if you intend on using this card to run extremely high resolutions on the most demanding of games you may wish to look elsewhere. 1.25GB of GDDR5 is simply not enough to store the masses of instructions needed to feed the overclocked GPU which as I suspected at the beginning of the review would be the GIGABYTE GTX570 'SOC's Achilles heel.

That said, this is a fantastic GPU and unless you have a 30" screen to hand or have the available funds for its bigger brother, the GTX580 'SOC', I cannot see any other reason why this card should not be high on your shopping list if you are in the market for a quiet, cool yet high performing card that has the hassle of overclocking done for you. For this reason I am happy to present the GIGABYTE GTX570 1280MB 'SOC' our coveted Silver award.

Thanks to GIGABYTE for providing todays review sample.