Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 OC Edition Review

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few months, you should have some knowledge that NVIDIA finally released their GTX 400-series lineup in order to compete against a surging ATI. If you remember our original reviews of each card, there was a serious sense of anticipation about what the future would bring for the Fermi architecture. You’ll also recall that while it was quite obvious that the GTX 480 was simply the fastest single GPU card available, we were most impressed by the GTX 470. The reasoning behind this was that card’s ability to strike a balance with its price, performance and power consumption that in our opinion made it more appealing than the no-hold-barred GTX 480.

Since those first reviews were published, several of NVIDIA’s board partners have tried their hand at improving upon the reference design with some interesting results. Most recently we reviewed the EVGA GTX 470 Superclocked+ which incorporated a unique cooling design that not only lowered temperatures but also retained the reference heatsink so as not to substantially increase its price. Gigabyte will soon be bringing over the Super Overclock namesake into the GTX 400-series world which should hopefully bring about some impressive performance increases. Until that series is brought over, Gigabyte is looking to whet people’s appetites with a lineup of moderately overclocked cards beginning with the card being featured in this review: the GTX 470 OC Edition.

Much like EVGA’s own Superclocked card, Gigabyte’s OC Edition doesn’t feature any massive clock speed increases but rather it is being released as a value-added proposition of those of you who simply don’t want a stock card. Naturally, this bump in performance goes hand in hand with a corresponding increase in price but this doesn’t seemed to have happened with this particular card. From the first day the GTX 470 was released, Gigabyte’s pricing has been extremely aggressive. So even though the OC Edition does retail for about $15 more than Gigabyte’s reference version, this still puts it in-line with the prices most other AIBs are asking for their stock-clocked cards.

While Gigabyte may not have a lengthy warranty like EVGA, their 3 years of coverage is still more than adequate for the vast majority of consumers out there. As such, the proposition of owning even a slightly overclocked card from a reputable manufacturer for the price of most other reference versions should appeal to most people out there. So, let’s check on how this card does and see if there are any issues which may stop it from becoming an instant classic.