A time-traveler from two years ago would see the graphics card below to be a $100-ish mainstream fare, but looks can be extremely deceptive. This puppy packs more bite than a Radeon R9 290X. Gigabyte's latest creation puts a GeForce GTX 970 into a compact board that should play well with mini-ITX builds. The GTX 970 ITX card (model: N970IX-OC) features a full-height PCB that's about as long as a mini-ITX motherboard (17 cm), and a dense WindForce cooling solution that uses a single 100 mm fan to ventilate a dense aluminium fin heatsink, to which heat is fed by two 8 mm thick, and one 5 mm thick copper heat-pipes.

The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Display outputs include one HDMI 2.0, two dual-link DVI, and three DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. It comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 1076 MHz core and 1216 MHz GPU Boost, compared to reference clocks of 1051/1178 MHz. The memory is left untouched at 7.00 GHz. The best part about this card is its price. Gigabyte is charging no premium, pricing it at US $329.99.