The GTX 970 and GTX 980 have been getting a lot of attention from gamers because of its fairly low TDP and PSU requirement. Thus, it only makes sense for companies to shrink the size of the card for use on compact form factors such as Mini-ITX. That’s exactly what Gigabyte did with its first GTX970-based Mini-ITX GFX card conveniently called GTX 970 Mini-ITX.
In terms of its size, the GTX 970 Mini-ITX is only 170mm long and 120mm wide making it an ideal choice for gamers who are building a small gaming rig.
Within the confounds of the aforementioned dimension, Gigabyte was squeeze in WindForce-inspired cooler with three copper heat pipes soldered into its aluminum fin array. Dissipating heat is handled by a single 100mm fan which bears the company’s “Triangle Cool” implementation.
This card is overclocked right off the bat with the base and boost frequencies clocked at 1051Mhz and 1216Mhz respectively. It’s not a significant jump from the reference card to say the least, but should it’s still an upgrade nonetheless.
The card is powered by a single 8-pin connector and features a total of seven (7) ports at the back for HDMI, three (3) DisplayPort outs and two DVI ports (DVI-I and DVI-D).
Gigabyte GTX 970 Mini-ITX (GV-N970IXOC-4GD) specs:
Process: 28nm
Architecture: Maxwell
CUDA Cores: 1664
Compute Performance: 4 TFLOPS
Base Engine Clock: 1051Mhz
Boost Engine Clock: up to 1216MHz (Boost)
VRAM: 4GB DDR5
Memory Clock: 7Gbps
Memory Bus Width: 256-bit
Bandwidth: 224GB/s
TDP: 145W
PCI Express 3.0
Supported Technologies: NVIDIA GameStream, GPU Boost 2.0, 3D Vision, CUDA, DirectX 12, PhysX, MFAA, GeForce ShadowPlay, GameWorks, OpenGL 4.4, G-SYNC
Supports up to 4 displays @4096×2160 max resolution
1x Dual-Link DVI-I, 1x DVI-D, 3x DisplayPort 1.2 and 1x HDMI
Power Connectors: 1x 8-pin power connector
Surprisingly, despite of the minor tweaks that Gigabyte has done on the card, it didn’t result in a price hike. The Gigabyte GTX 970 Mini-ITX can be had for $329.99 which is the same MSRP of an NVidia GeForce GTX 970 reference card!
TDB is the new feature of maxwell architectures. Low TDB means low IQ like me