Another quality card primed for the enthusiast. After speaking with a number of graphics partners out in Taipei last month, the common consensus is that Nvidia has hit a home run with the GeForce GTX 970 GPU. Power-efficient, cool and performing on par with the Radeon R9 290X, the second-rung Maxwell arrives with a tasty £250 price tag.

There's enough scope in the GPU architecture for it to scale higher, enabling partners to differentiate their overclocked products by tinkering with the core frequency. Gigabyte sells three versions of the GTX 970 GPU - two equipped with the proven WindForce 3X cooling solution and a Mini-ITX design primed for small-form factor systems. The faster WindForce 3X model goes by the name of G1 Gaming, matching what's on offer from the GTX 980 catalogue, and similarities between the two GPUs are plain to see.

Gigabyte uses similar WindForce 3X styling for this model, but the two cards are different, with the GTX 970 version using four heatpipes compared to the 980's six. Whereas that higher-specified model uses a massive hunk of copper that's punctuated by the heatpipes, GTX 970 makes do with a cheaper aluminium insert, though Gigabyte does show attention to detail by using thermal pads for the memory and a larger heatsink for the hot-running VRMs.