THE_EGGThere is a difference between the 970 and 980 Windforce coolers. I believe the 980 has 6 heatpipes vs the 4 heatpipes on the 970 and the 980 also has a much larger copper plate compared to the 970 which has a direct touch heatpipe design. The 980's cooler also has noticeably more fins. On the outside though they look almost identical. It wouldn't surprise me if this G1 Gaming 960 was a nerfed 970 cooler (or uber nerfed 980 cooler) but looking at the picture more closely it looks to have the same heatpipe arrangement as the 970.

hatMaybe they're just using the same cooler they use on other gpus.

Dj-ElectriCwhen it comes to coolers - gigabyte have a plan for some cards.
sometimes, they would over-kill a gpu with a cooler that was used for higher end card before
Than, they would redesign a cooler for another revision of the card. The new cooler would be cheaper and less powerful than the first one.

There's a big possibility that the cooler you see in the picture will actually change soon into something more domestic.

Examples can be found with GTX 760 windforce rev.1 (PCB 1.0 was 670 WF3's and the same cooler, PCB 2.0 was something simpler and cheaper in both).

hatI didn't think of design/marketing. I thought maybe it would just be cheaper/easier for them to use one cooler that works on all the cards. That way they're not designing and manufacturing different coolers for different cards. I thought it would be more practical this way.

Gigabyte GTX 970 4GB G1 Gaming :