GIGABYTE GV-N470SO-13I Pro Reviews

The GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition is an incredibly fast version of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 graphics card. Sure you pay a premium, but you are getting a premium product! Superior performance, a barely audible cooler that does a bang up job, and the least important factor to me - great looks. Put the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition at the top of my short list of graphics cards!

As a GeForce GTX 470, Gigabyte's Super Overclock card is certainly worthy of praise. Turning NVIDIA's hot-and-noisy design on its head, Gigabyte's custom derivative is cooler, quieter, less power hungry and, most importantly, over 10 per cent faster too. Out the box, it's better than reference in almost every way, and the card has enough overclocking headroom to deliver performance close to that of NVIDIA's top-end GTX 480 when pushed.

Our opinion of Gigabyte’s past Super Overclock products has run the gamut from absolute love to questioning the apparent degeneration of the brand. While the latest versions of the SoC (namely the HD 5770) haven’t shown much promise, moving the brand back to NVIDIA-branded products is an absolute success in our books. The GTX 470 Super Overclock brings a substantial performance increase to the table which perfectly bridges the sometimes substantial gap between a reference GTX 470 and the class leading GTX 480. Amazingly, this was achieved without a memory overclock which leads us to believe that the GF100 core is anything but bandwidth starved. Would higher memory speeds have led to substantially higher performance? From our overclocking tests, it seems so and which leads us to question Gigabyte’s decision to keep to the reference clock speed here.

The GTX 470 continues to have better value than its big brother, the GTX 480 and here today you can see that for the most part it lags less than 10% behind the more expensive model. And while it doesn't hold the same value as a model like the GTX 460, if you just want that faster out of the box performance that doesn't involve a massive overclock, a model like the GTX 470 is a better option. If you want even more performance and a really nicely upgraded cooler, then the Super Overclock version from GIGABYTE is the one to buy.

Gigabyte’s Super Overclock card has to be the most impressive GeForce GTX 470 we’ve seen yet. If you value low noise and high performance, and don’t mind paying a pretty penny for an already-overclocked board, the GV-N470SO-13I Super Overclocked edition card should be on your short list.