Load the Game Video Games, Reviews, Game News, Game Reviews & Game Video Trailers
Gigabyte has unveiled its first small form factor graphics card, the GTX 970 Mini-ITX. As this type of peripheral has become increasingly popular for Mini-gaming PC fans, Gigabyte decided to give it a go at this market. With a significantly downsized design, this Mini-ITX model will play out as a nice upgrade for gamers who love good gaming tools shipped in small packages. The Mini-ITX practice was previously employed by giant manufacturers such as Asus which came out with its own GTX 670 Mini-ITX, MSI with the GTX 760 Mini-ITX, and Sapphire with the Radeon R9 285 Mini-ITX. This GTX 970 Mini-ITX built by Gigabyte will certainly be the fastest of the lot, packing the same GPU power utilized by its bigger brother, with a custom cooling system and printed circuit board.
Gigabyte has also implemented a factory overclock for the GTX 970 Mini-ITX, propelling the card’s boost speed to 1216Mhz, 38Mhz higher than the original design. The core speed tops 1050Mhz, while the boost clock 1178 MHz. Breaking down the card’s cooling system, a custom high density dual-slot heatsink with three heatpipes was fitted to cool down this powerful high-end toy. Gigabyte also introduces a new 85mm fan we’ve previously seen in their G1 Gaming graphics cards, and a back plate for the GTX 970 Mini-ITX. This card will maintain Nvidia’s original I/O setup with two DVI interfaces, one HDMI and three DisplayPort interfaces. However, one of the DVI outputs is DVI-D and the other DVI-I, while Nvidia’s initial design features exclusively DVI-I outputs for Analog and Digital devices.
The Gigabyte GTX 970 Mini-ITX is expected to eat up a fair amount of power, somewhere around 145W. The card can be fitted on laptops via an external PCI-E port, although you’ll need to check first if this is supported by your device. Being a dual-slot card, you’ll also have to check if the room inside your case is big enough to house the GTX 970 Mini-ITX. Gigabyte will start shipping its GTX 970 Mini-ITX this November, at a reasonable price of $330.
