Is it me or there's very few reviews of the former? I'm trying to compare both cards. Only comparative review I could find was the one of Hardware Canucks, where the Matrix only emits 50°C at full load, while it is 68°C for the Gigabyte.
I have the Gigabyte G1 Windforce, but I would advise against it because of the noise. In idle and under load, the fans on this card make a lot of noise. But on the plus side, the card is very cool and performs very well. I had a Asus GTX 770 DirectCU II and I found it to be a lot quieter than the 970 Windforce.
I had a 7870 with a DirectCU II cooler and a 560Ti with a WindForce cooler. The DirectCU II cooler was silent, whereas the WindForce cooler was rather noisy. The TwinFrozr on my 970 is very quiet as well.
Under idle they are dead silent, onder load they produce noise, yes but not like allot, my old gtx 690 did make more noice under load then these cards. Btw one card is on rma status, for some reason after a few pc complete shutdowns, it does not regonise my card anymore in windows, and the blue led was off, so waiting for a new one, and go sli again Anyway i reckon the card, they are dead silent under iddle, and under load they are not noisy either.
Not really. The G1 at idle is veru noisy. I had to modify it's fan profile to make it spin slower at idle. Even at 34% speed, wich is the minimum speed for the fans on the G1, it's still noisier than the Direct CU II.
Then u must have a bad airflow or revision 1.0 they run a bit louder then rev 1.1 Because mine runs @ 20% fan speed @ iddle, if i open msi after burner or aida64 it also says 20% with default settings.
