Tonight I found myself taking some photos of the new Gigabyte HD 5770 Super Overclock and it made me think of a few other companies out there and what there stand out series are. While companies like Sapphire have some stand out models unlike MSI and Gigabyte they don’t have the luxury of being able to offer users NVIDIA and ATI.
The HD 5770 SOC though seemed to really cement in my mind why it’s one of the best series. For me there’s two stand out series at the moment, the SOC from Gigabyte and the Lightning from MSI. While I like both series the SOC is the better one on the marketing side of things for the simple reason being that Gigabyte have chosen to take it outside of just the highest end models.
MSI have offered the Lightning in the HD 5870 from ATI, on the NV front we saw them last year give it to some of the higher end GTX 200 series. The next model we should see from them is the GTX 480.
Gigabyte on the other hand have attacked the HD 5770 recently and coming soon is the GTX 470. While we understand that MSI have chosen to reserve the Lightning series to only the best single GPU cards I get this feeling that they’re throwing opportunity away, much in the same way I feel Sapphire have done by not making full use of the ATOMIC series in the HD 5000 line up.
The HD 5870 Lightning was a very technical card and a lot went into it, the HD 5870 SOC on the other hand wasn’t as technical but the end result for many people was a card that was cheaper and faster thanks to the 950MHz core vs the 900MHz core.
Companies need to take advantage of the series that they create, Gigabyte started the SOC series a bit back and have really ran with it. At the same time they’re not just slapping the name onto any model, the HD 5770 is overclocked too 900MHz on the core which clearly warrants it.
Hopefully as time goes on we’ll see companies take more advantage of the series they have and give us even more choices to play with, because while overclocking isn’t hard there’s still a large amount of people out there who don’t want to do it or are just worried about doing it.