Gainward has now officially unveiled its custom version of the Geforce GTX 770, the Gainward GTX 770 Phantom.

Based on the GTX 770 design paired up with a custom cooling solution, the new GTX 770 Phantom graphics card works at higher clocks, 1150MHz base and 1202MHz Boost GPU clocks to be precise. In contrast, the reference clocks are 1046MHz base and 1085MHz Boost.

The GTX 770 Phantom features 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface and clocked at reference 7010MHz. For the first time we see Nvidia going for such fast memory modules, which should go a long way towards boosting performance. The peak memory bandwidth stands at 224.3GB/sec – that’s 15% more bandwidth than last year’s Geforce GTX 680 (6008MHz effective). Nvidia also made it possible for partners to come up with custom cards with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

The GTX 770 is closely related to the GTX 680, as they are both based on the GK104 GPU. Both cards have 1536 CUDA cores, 128 texture units and 32 ROPs, but the GTX 770 can draw as much as 230W of power, whereas the GTX 680 is happy with just 195W. Of course, the GTX 680 has slower memory and its GPU clock is 1006GHz, while the boost clock is 1058MHz.

Judging by the specs, the performance difference compared to the GTX 680 can’t be that big and we’re hoping that the price of the GTX 770 will reflect this fact.

In order to keep the GPU and other temperatures at bay, Gainward decided to use the Phantom cooler with a rather hefty heatsink. While Nvidia's reference cooler is quite good Gainward certainly has a lot of confidence in its own version.

We already had a chance to get acquainted with the Phantom cooler. We saw it on Gainward’s GTX 680 and some other cards, but the GTX 770 version was redesigned to provide superior cooling performance and generate a bit less noise. There’s another nice feature – the fan can be removed without removing the heatsink or messing with the wiring. We’ll take a closer look at the cooler a bit later on.

Geforce GTX 770 also features the same GPU Boost 2.0 technology used in the GeForce GTX Titan and GTX 780, giving gamers more advanced controls for overclocking, fan control, and hardware monitoring.