VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-08-12
Guaranteed for stability during a 168-hour period of stress testing, the Gigabyte GeForce 750Ti Black Edition is factory overclocked and features a custom dual-fan efficient cooling system. The card performances can be further enhanced while using the supplied OC Guru II and can be used for gaming up to Full HD while using medium to high detail levels.
At first we would like to thank Gigabyte Taiwan for offering a sample of their Nvidia 750Ti Ultra Durable Black Edition video card for testing and reviewing.
“GIGABYTE was founded in 1986, establishing our uncontested position in continuous technological innovation. By focusing on key technologies and achieving strict quality standards, GIGABYTE has been regarded as an innovative and trusted motherboard leader in the globe. To keep pace in a rapidly changing world, we have offered a comprehensive product line covering Motherboards, Graphics Cards, PC Components, PC Peripherals, Laptops, Slate Devices, Desktop PCs, Network Communications, Servers and Mobile Phones. We are dedicated to building up a full-range digital life, responding promptly and sonorously to consumer needs and desires.”
Ultra Durable BLACK EDITION
Extended server level 168 hour Durability Test
GIGABYTE Black Edition Graphics Cards undergo an extra 168 hours (7 days) of stress testing before shipment to ensure premium quality for our customers.
During the 168 hour test, each graphics card needs to pass rigorous, full system validation testing for 1 full week. GIGABYTE has built a custom testing facility at our Taiwan (Nanping) factory.
A certificate of validation is included with every card, issued by the GIGABYTE factory and signed by the manufacturing VP & GM to indicate that each card has passed our highest test standards.
WindForce 2X Anti-turbulence-Parallel inclined Fan
WINDFORCE 2X parallel-inclined fin design is equipped with 2 ultra-quiet PWM fans and copper heat pipe to enlarge air channel on the graphics card vents and creates a more effective airflow system in chassis.
Gold plated HDMI
Gold plated, durable large contact area connectors have been used for optimum signal transfer between connections
Up to 4 displays on a Single Card
Support up to four displays on a single card. Satisfy your multi-screen setup, high definition and extreme gaming experience.
OC GURU ll
Brand-new instinctive user interface, easier to monitor and adjust all important settings; users can set up MONITORING, GPU CLOCK, MEMORY CLOCK,FAN, OSD, ONLINE SUPPORT and update driver, BIOS directly.
The card we are going to have looked up in this article takes part from Gigabytes’ Black Edition series which means that the product is guaranteed to be super stable since the company has tested it extensively during a period of 168 hours before shipping. An additional certification document with signatures is included inside the box in order to prove this aspect so if you are looking for a pre-tested, error-free product, you should also have Black Edition cards in view. The GTX 750Ti GPU from Nvidia takes part of the mainstream segment and is equipped with 640 CUDA cores, 40 Texture units and 16 ROPs. The GM107 Maxwell GPU communicates with the 2GB GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus while the rated transistor count is 1.87B. When talking about frequencies, we could remind that the OEM model is running at 1020MHz with a Boost Clock of 1085MHz and the memory is clocked at 1350MHz; Gigabyte has pre-overclocked the card to 1163MHz with a Boost Clock of 1242MHz, while the memory clocks haven’t been touched.
The packaging retains Nvidia colors and on the front Gigabyte reminds us that we are dealing with a Black Edition model, 4K video output possibility and Windforce cooling system are also represented as small pictograms, while the total memory quantity can be seen in the lower right corner:
On the back side of the box, Gigabyte explains us the cooling system in more detail and we can also learn more of the Ultra Durable 2 technology which was implemented:
While the card is fully enclosed inside a white foam mold, on the top we will find the documentation:
The certification we were talking about is also enclosed, along with the disk which contains the necessary drivers and a Quick Installation Guide:
For power supplies which do not have enough connectors available, Gigabyte is supplying a MOLEX to PCI-E 6-pin adapter:
The Black Edition card comes with a Windforce 2x cooling solution, which incorporates two 80mm fans and a metallic shroud as on the high-end boards; these fans are meant to cool the large heatsink with an integrated heatpipe:
Each 80mm fan is equipped with 11 semi-transparent blades:
The side views of the card confirm that the build quality is superior compared to other manufacturers:
On the PCB we will also find a 6-pin PCI-Express connector which supplies extra power to the card:
The bottom side reveals some extra stickers along with the spring-loaded screws:
The cooling system is a bit longer than the PCB so a small plastic component was used in order to keep it fixed and avoid damages:
As video outputs we have two HDMI ports, but also one Dual-link DVI-I and one DVI-D:
In order to expose the top side of the PCB, we will remove the four spring-loaded screws on the back side:
The card construction is quite simple, with the VRM located on the left side and the central GPU is surrounded by four RAM chips:
The SKHynix memory chips carry the H5GC4H24MFR and are specified to run at 1500MHz:
The GM107 GPU was built on the 28nm manufacturing process at TSMC:
A closer look on the bottom side of the heatsink reveals a single direct-contact heatpipe which travels from one side to another:
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.7GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: Currently reviewed card
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.7.8 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
The latest version of the OC GURU II overclocking utility can be downloaded from the manufacturers’ website and from the main interface we can fine-tune the clocks for both GPU and memory, increase the voltages, set custom fan curves and more:
The Monitoring section can be opened in a more advanced way, which shows live graphs of the current GPU Clock, Memory Clock, GPU Voltage, Memory Voltage, current Fan Speed or GPU Temperature:
In order to create new fan profiles, we will have to access the respective section and draw a graph:
The location of the OSD can be modified, along with the hot key, the Screenshot hot key and some screen settings:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at 2560x1440 resolution for an additional 30 to 40 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 27.4 degrees Celsius.
Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.7dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by OC Guru II, but we were not able to record the RPM values for each step:
For a very small price increase, Gigabyte has released the Black Edition video cards to the market, which guarantee stability of the received product after internal burn-in tests during a 168-hour period; these products are great to be installed in workstations which need to perform important tasks without unnecessary interruptions. The manufacturer has also applied a consistent factory overclock to the GPU, from 1020MHz and Boost 1085MHz which are the OEM clocks to 1163MHz with a Boost of 1242MHz. This is not all! The card is quite overclockable and without raising the GPU voltages we were able to climb in frequency quite a bit:
With the stock card speeds, we would recommend gaming at 1680x1050 resolutions with medium to high levels of details, while being careful with the settings when going up to Full HD, since depending on the game we might experience different performance levels.
The WindForce 2x cooling system is a miniature version of the one we can find on the Gigabyte high-end cards and does its job very well, despite the fact that it only has a single heatpipe. The card is barely noticeable when in 2D, while in high-load 3D continues to be quite silent, while keeping the temperatures to low levels.
The card can be found online for about 134 euros, while other cards with no overclock and simple cooling are available for about 115 Euros. The extra tax counts for the efficient dual-fan cooling system, guaranteed card overclock but also the useful 168 hours of continuous stress testing, which we think that is completely fair.
Gigabyte GeForce 750Ti Ultra Durable Black Edition is Recommended For:
We would like to thank again to Gigabyte Taiwan for making this review possible!