I just got a pair of Gigabyte Windforce OC 970s, as they were priced £25 less than the G1 and also looked like the best brand and lowest priced custom cooled versions.
The cards are phenomenal, both mine maxed out at at an amazing 1539 Mhz core, and 8200 Mhz memory without any artifacts.
The cooler is a bit worse than the G1 edition though as it only has 2 heatpipes, but still when overclocked the temps stay in the mid 70s which is more than adequate.
One thing that surprised me the most is that the coolers / temperatures are performing perfectly out of the box. I always used to buy MSI twinfrozr cards and they always applied their thermal paste terribly - my last cards were SLI MSI lightning edition 680s, great cards but one of them was heating up to over 90 degrees under load. To make things worse, for the first time MSI stuck warranty void if removed stickers over the heatsink screws (I only remove the heatsink to repaste if necessary, and this can occur within a cards warranty period, just like with any CPU).
I ignored the sticker warning on the MSI card with dodgy temps, repasted and voila, temperatures reduced by almost 20 degrees. When contacting MSI about this, they told me to return the card for repair / replacement. What an unnecessary amount of hassle that would be when replacing the paste is so easy. I also had similar issues, but not as severe as my 680 on previous MSI cards too, the temperatures always seemed a bit too high for their Twinfrozr coolers, and after repasting they would drop by 5-10 degrees.
From what I can tell with both my Gigabyte windforce cards, the coolers are performing perfectly, around 60 degrees at stock speeds, and around 75 with full load when overclocked on the stock fan profile. The only reason I avoided gigabyte cards in the past was because I strongly disliked their blue PCBs, but now they are black and look great through my side window.
I wrote a short review up here if anyone wants to see it:
http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-cards/332257-gigabyte-windforce-oc-970-a.htmlTheres a couple of things I would like to find out without having to remove my coolers though, as there are no proper reviews with pictures of the cards PCB or cooler - Do these cards use the same PCB as the G1 edition, and are the two heatpipes on the cooler direct contact?
