A showcase line in which the Chinese manufacturer Gainward, little known in our area, does not hesitate to flex its muscles and challenges heavyweights like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, Zotac, etc. to battle. This confidence comes from the fact that the Advanced models always look extremely serious, including a redesigned circuit board, a pumped power subsystem and an optimized air cooling system consisting of three coolers. Otherwise, the design approach is slightly different from what buyers are used to seeing in similar products for enthusiasts.


Firstly, these are rare samples of ultra-class video cards, which were not necessarily stumbled upon by the ubiquitous address lighting. There is a backlight, as it were, but the number of LEDs is negligible and usually they decorate the company logo. Instead of illumination, the company's engineers focused on strengthening the body and durability of the device: each generation of Phantom accelerators is equipped with a massive backplate that helps to keep the entire structure afloat, and the same massive metal protective casing. This affects the weight and dimensions, which is why a typical Phantom takes up more than three expansion slots and weighs about 2 kg! This approach is somewhat reminiscent of MSI Armor cards, beloved by many gamers, with their reinforced frame.

In addition, engineers completely change the design of the printed circuit board, increase the number of fins and heat pipes in the cooling system, upgrade the power subsystem and equip the cards with additional power connectors, preparing them for overclocking. As a result, most of the people from this line can boast of serious factory overclocking, which can be further developed using manual frequency selection. For example, the Phantom 'GS' flagship RTX 3090 runs out of the box at 1845 MHz, which is almost 10% higher than the reference sample, after which it manually overclocks beautifully. As a result, its productivity can be increased by almost 20%. The flip side of the coin is an increase in power consumption, which is why the manufacturer advises choosing power supplies 25% more powerful than indicated in the recommendations of the reference samples.