as usual NVIDIA's recent graphics card launch was dominated by coverage of
their new flagship gtx 980 and we were
guilty of focusing on it too but i think in some ways the lower price gtx 970
could actually be much more interesting from a regular gamer's perspective
especially if its performance is similar enough to its beast of a big brother
welcome to our gtx 970 review featuring the strix direct co2 from ASUS
cooler master neptune series CPU coolers are available in a variety of radiator
sizes to perfectly suit your next build click now to learn more
we'll start with a brief overview of how the reference gtx 970 stacks up against
the gtx 980. the memory config is identical it's got the same 256 bit
memory bus with the same four gigs of vram clocked at the same seven gigahertz
but the core is where NVIDIA has opted to cut their second tier card down this
time around the gtx 970 gets 13 sms
compared to 16 on the 980 giving it about 80 percent as many cuda cores and
texture units and it comes with a lower clock speed out of the box but that's
about it and ASUS takes care of one of these things right off the bat by
delivering their non-reference card with a factory increased boost clock of 1253
megahertz actually higher than a reference 980. of course as usual we
aren't going to be running the card at factory speeds anyway so we're more
interested in how the rest of ASUS's alterations including that their latest
version of GPU tweak their overclocking utility supports automatic GPU BIOS
updates on certain cards now are going to affect the performance we'll start
with a general physical overview ASUS has increased the height of the card
especially near the sli connector that supports up to three-way sli
configurations they've changed out the dual 6-pin PCIe connectors for a single
8-pin connector they've changed the stylized back plate to a sexy brushed
aluminum jobby they've swapped out the in my opinion much better i o config for
a more conventional one with dvid dvii
HDMI 2.0 and displayport 1.2 ports of
which you can use all four at the same time in a three surround and then one
auxiliary configuration and finally they've increased the length of the card
slightly to 11 inches to accommodate the much larger heat sink design and the
cooler probably deserves its own little overview here ASUS is using a dual 92
millimeter triple heat pipe direct cu type cooler that means the heat pipes
make direct contact with the GPU core with an open-air design ASUS quotes
220 percent as much overall surface area
compared to reference so this should give us better card temps compared to a
reference cooler at the cost of internal system temps if you're not using a case
with solid airflow pulling the cooler off the card by removing the four screws
around the core at the back reveals one large 10 millimeter diameter heat pipe
flanked by a couple of eight millimeter ones and this also gives us a better
look at the pcb for the card revealing the final advantage that non-reference
cards often have over normal ones ASUS six phase super alloy power and digital
vrm design is made to increase the lifespan and efficiency of the card and
lower random electrical noise and while it's difficult for us to observe the
first two directly especially without a reference 970 to compare against our
experience with ASUS direct cu cards lately including this one has been that
they are extremely quiet with no observable coil whine which leads us to
what i think is the coolest feature of this card and presumably the one that
led to the owl logo for it the 976 has a
zero decibel idle fan mode so the fan doesn't spin at all
with the system powered on and it can actually stay
off even in games as long as they aren't very demanding so games like league of
legends are perfect candidates for this of course it'll ramp up like any other
card when overclocking or pushing it hard but it speaks volumes about the
efficiency of the cooler and the efficiency of the maxwell-based gm204
GPU that this card is equipped with that it can do this at all
so along with GeForce experience shadow play game recording game stream
network gaming on shield devices and automatic game optimization and driver
updates NVIDIA has added some very interesting new technologies to 900
series cards including third generation delta color compression to make better
use of memory bandwidth dynamic super resolution a way of running less
demanding or older games at higher res than down sampling for better visuals
mfaa a less demanding anti-aliasing mode
with pretty much the same visual quality as msaa and auto-asynchronous warp a vr
feature that should improve the experience for users of the oculus rift
or similar head tracking head mounted displays who are prone to motion
sickness you can get more in-depth explanations of these technologies in my
gtx 980 video linked here
for now the big thing we want to know is how the gtx 970 stacks up against the
competition from a price to performance standpoint as well as from an efficiency
standpoint take it away luke all right guys just a reminder that we're running
all of our benchmarks overclocked and that our per graphics card overclocking
settings are laid out in the graphics card overclocking dock in the
description below this video speaking of which first up we have overclocking do
the 970 not being equipped with the auto balancing power rails that bless the 780
ti and 980 the overclocking of this card is
fairly straightforward apply some voltage increase the power level
allowance jack up the core and memory clock speeds set a temp target and voila
you're hopefully running at a range of 1403 to 1459 or above when it finally
came to running actual numbers i was happy with how well it performed in
essentially every test it slotted itself snugly between the 770 and 780 which is
good considering it cost pretty much the same as a 770. but just like the gtx 980
before it the 970 isn't exactly earth shattering in terms of raw performance
when compared to the already existing big dogs but what it is is a much better
value the price per performance of these cards is much stronger than the previous
generation of heavy hitters and this is especially true when talking about
wattage coming in at a full system wattage of 305 the 970 is an extremely
low power overhead card which might actually make a noticeable difference on
your power bill depending on what you're running i'm looking at you gtx 480
owners and that's not all this card is running at a temperature of only 71
degrees while under load while overclocked not bad at all if you ask me
back to you Linus alright so with that out of the way it looks like the gtx 970
is everything we hoped it would be the 980 is interesting to folks who have 500
plus dollars to spend on a GPU but if you're on a tighter budget or upgrading
an older system both the power efficiency even you might not want to
upgrade to a new power supply and the frankly stunning performance of the 970
strix make it a compelling choice for two and a half k or even light 4k gaming
at a much lower price than its bigger brother
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i don't know gtx 970s or whatever else the case may be thanks again for
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