Small on the outside, big on the inside. Gigabyte has been a champion of Nvidia's GeForce graphics cards for a while now. Memory issues aside, the GeForce GTX 970 continues to offer a decent mix of performance, power efficiency and price. Basic cards cost around £260 and have enough horsepower to drive games at a tasty 2,560x1,440 resolution.

But too many times manufacturers take little heed of Nvidia's design philosophy and, rather than build a scenario-specific card, simply attach existing coolers that may not be the ideal match for the GPU underneath. Behemoth GTX 970s housed on 12-inch-long PCBs are missing the point of the Maxwell architecture.