The first thing that struck us was that GIGABYTE have changed the materials of the fan shroud. Gone is the shiny black plastic, which felt very fragile. This has since been replaced by an aluminium frame which is much more sturdy and appealing.
The three fans retain their smoked black appearance and contrast well with the surrounding shroud while still allowing the users to see the cleanliness of the heatsink below.
Another welcome change is the PCB colouration. Gone is the electric blue circuit board which we have been complaining about for years. Black is the only colour we want for a graphics card power circuit board please. Black goes with everything regardless of your colour scheme. Sadly it has a silky sheen to it rather than being Matt but we will forgive GIGABYTE for this oversight as moving to a black PCB is a big enough change for a company which is synonymous with blue PCB's save for the SuperOverClock (SOC) editions.
The profile of the card is quite anonymous really. We would have liked to have seen the Windforce emblem be printed along the side rather than on 'top' where it will not be seen in an your average ATX style case. That said we do like the cutouts of the shroud which allow hot air to be vented. Sadly, the fan adapters are white which makes them stand out and while the cabling is taped securely to the underneath of the shroud, we would have preferred not to see them at all.
The input/output area features the usual plethora of DVI-D, DVI-I, HDMI 1.4A and DisplayPort. The backplate also has a vent but for all intents and purposes this will not serve any purpose as the fins of the heatsink are perpendicular to this vent so any hot air will be circulated into the PC case and exhausted by the case fans.
GIGABYTE recommed a 600W PS to power this card. GIGABYTE supply both twin MOLEX to 8pin and twin MOLEX to 6pin adapters should your PSU not have these PCIe power cables which are also required to power the GPU.
As with the reference design, the Windforce OC GTX770 also has twin SLI tabs allowing the addition of multiple GPUs from the same family for SLI gaming.
Overall we love the look of the GIGABYTE GTX770 Windforce 3x OC. There are however a few small details that require correcting as pointed out above. None of this of course affects the functionality of the card but speaking from a purely aesthetic stance, 'the Devil is in the details'.
