Zotac GTX980 AMP! Edition 4GB

This next graphics card is enough to make the gamers among you drool. The Zotac GTX980 AMP! Edition is, at the time of writing at least, regarded as the most powerful graphics card in the world. As we all know, though, technology marches onward at a pace, so by the time you read this, that claim may belong to another model.

For now, though, this immensely impressive looking monster of a card has been given the Zotac treatment, a company that prides itself in aggressively overclocking already super-fast cards and has come out with a GPU core clock speed of 1165MHz, with a potential boost speed of up to 1266MHz – a good 4% faster than the stock GTX980.

EVGA GT 740 Superclocked 4GB

EVGA has been producing graphics cards since the late 90s and has doing a pretty good of it too. It not be quite as prominent these days as it once was, but its hardware is still up to scratch and can stand toe to toe with the more popular manufacturers.

The EVGA GT 740 Superclocked graphics card uses the GK107-425-A2 GPU variant of the popular mid-level GK107 GPU that was released last year by Nvidia. The original GPU clock speed of the GT 740 was around 990MHz, but EVGA has given this version of the GPU an turbo boost of 9% to 1085MHz, although oddly the memory clock speed was left at the original 1250MHz.

Sapphire R7 240 4GB

Sapphire is a company whose history in the development of the graphics card can be traced back to the turn of the millennium. 2001 saw many an enthusiast drooling over the latest Sapphire release, so we were looking forward to getting into this Radeon R7 240.

The R7 240 from Sapphire features an Oland Pro GPU variant running at a 730MHz core clock speed, with a boost up to 780MHz. The DDR3 4GB memory runs at 900MHz, with the card having a TDP of 30W.

MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G

MSI certainly sknows how to make a lump of plastic metal and silicon look dazzling. Okay, so it’s just a graphics card, but to us, they're impressive-looking objects.

The MSI GTX970 4G certainly stands out from the crowd, with two elaborately designed, 100mm downdraft fans positioned atop a huge nickel-plated copper heatsink, with four heatpipes winding through the aluminium fins.

GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion

For years on end, GIGABYTE’s orange and black overclocking boards have been legends of sorts within the community. From the original X58-A right up to the latest X99-SOC Champion, they have always been met with great expectations and for the most part they have risen to expectations.

Unfortunately as we had feared when the X99 chipset was introduced, most vendors including GIGABYTE had a good motherboard, but there was the Rampage V Extreme which stood lightyears ahead of the rest. It seemed we were destined to have a repeat of the X79 lifecycle with no alternatives to a single motherboard, forcing everyone to either buy that or pretty much give up on the platform as a whole.

BenQ XL2430T Gaming Monitor

For all the money that is generated via professional competitive gaming one would imagine that gaming monitors would be at the forefront for many display vendors. This isn’t the case, even though we have many high scan rate monitors to choose from. Other than that particular aspect of gaming monitors, most vendors ignore or rather choose to walk a middle ground between competitive gamers and casual users.

With the BenQ XL2430T the focus is squarely on gaming. In fact, it is particularly competitive gaming. Not surprising given the vendor’s heavy investment into eSports and the deep product line up to match.