The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTOverclocking
With GTX 980 we saw first-hand how GM204 had very significant overclocking headroom. Even without the ability to meaningful overvolt on NVIDIA cards, we were able to push our base GPU clock speed up from 1126MHz to 1377MHz, or in terms of the maximum boost bin, from 1265MHz to 1515MHz. Consequently with GTX 970 shipping at lower clock speeds, we have very lofty expectations here.
But running counter to that will be TDP. As we have already seen, GTX 970 is TDP limited right out of the gate, so even if our card has more clock speed headroom, its 110% TDP limit doesn’t leave much more in the way of power headroom. Furthermore as this is already a factory overclocked card, there’s no guarantee that EVGA has left us much overclocking headroom to play with in the first place.
| EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW Overclocking | ||||
| FTW | Overclocked | |||
| Core Clock | 1216MHz | 1241MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1367MHz | 1392MHz | ||
| Max Boost Clock | 1418MHz | 1455MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 7GHz | 7.8GHz | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.218v | 1.243v | ||
And in fact our results show they haven’t. We aren’t able to get even another 50MHz out of our GPU before errors start setting in; 25MHz is all we will get, which pushes our base GPU clock speed from 1216MHz to 1241MHz, and our maximum boost clock from 1418MHz to 1455MHz. Overall this is a weaker overclock than GTX 980, though not immensely so.
Meanwhile memory overclocking was just as fruitful as it was on GTX 980, with our card being able to handle up to 7.8GHz on its GDDR5 memory. As we saw with GTX 980 we’re nearly as memory bandwidth bottlenecked as we are GPU bottlenecked, but we will take what performance we can get.
As you’d expect from such a mild overclock, the performance increase is very limited. Our overclocked GTX 970 FTW does close on GTX 980 even more, but even with this full overclock it won’t overcome the 3 SMM deficit.
Overall in all likelihood the GTX 970 FTW benefits more from the 10% increase in TDP than it does the clock speed increase. GTX 970 – and GM204 in general – clearly desires to be fed with more voltage and more power overall than what any NVIDIA approved card is going to see.
Power consumption and noise tick up, but only slightly. The limited 10% TDP increase means that the amount of power the card can draw and dissipate as heat only increases slightly. You aren’t getting much more performance, but you also aren’t getting much more noise.
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LancerVI - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Looks good! Mostly a side-grade for my 290's, but I knew that already. Probably the best purchase I made in a while, those 290's are gonna last me a bit. May have to ebay a 3rd for some tri-fire. I'll go nVidia next round depending, but I'm really impressed with the 980/970, but 290's right now are a steal!Impulses - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Did the prices drop significantly? I'm scared to look, I got mine for $350 (after rebate) and $360 about a month ago, didn't see anything priced that low immediately after the 980/970 launch but... You'd think AMD would now have to at least match 970 pricing with the 290 in order to sell any at all.Impulses - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
FWIW, I did think the price I paid for the 290s was pretty terrific and haven't regretted it yet... When looking at SLI vs CF tests the performance gaps from game to game are even narrower, a huge AMD price drop would be slightly irksome tho I understand it's bound to happen. OTOH, being so close to the holiday season I doubt we'd see any good sale prices atop any price drops or beyond the 980/970 price points.Death666Angel - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
The 980 and 970 make me excited for what nVidia (and hopefully AMD) has in store for 20nm next year. I'm not going to upgrade from my water cooled 7970 (35% chip and 20% memory OC) for another 28nm GPU, even if nVidia managed to squeeze a lot out of the process.StormFuror - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Wow, I didn't expect the 970 to pull up stats like this compared to the 780. I don't know why, lol. The power consumption from the horsepower this card throws down is rather impressive compared to AMD's R9's. I may have to get one of these. I'm stuck with one monitor @ 1920x1080. This card will give me 60 FPS in just about everything it seems, probably over kill. But this seems like it'll hold me over until I have to do a complete new rebuild down the road(when I upgrade to 4k). I've got a couple years :)eek2121 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
I know AT's benchmarks portrays the Radeon 6970 as 'slow as balls' when it comes to gaming recent titles, but as someone who games more than most (on a 1080p monitor), i still find very little incentive to upgrade. Maybe if i gamed at higher resolutions.... Haven't really encountered a game (worth playing) that doesn't run on ultra settings in 1080p. Then again, steam has been shifting my dollars away from top tier games towards indie games for a while now. I own 425 games on steam and all of them give me no issue on my 'old' graphics card. Not knocking the new geforce cards at all....just wish developers would push the envelope a bit more.TiGr1982 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Wel, old VLIW4-based HD 6970 is, say, something around 1/3 (33%) slower than GCN-based R9 280 aka HD 7950 Boost (which I have, BTW). But I believe that 6970 is more or less still good enough for 1080p, and, besides, probably the drivers for HD 6970 are pretty mature since HD 6970 is nearly 4 years old now (plus, Trinity and Richland also have VLIW4-based GPU, just 1/4 of HD 6970's Cayman GPU).just4U - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
The biggest thing for me is this..." For much of the last year NVIDIA has been more than performance competitive but not price competitive with AMD."
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That's been a major bone of contention with me. They corrected pricing which was very much in line and competitive during the 460-80 days. Then went out to lunch thru the 560-80 era and marginally came back (almost not quite..) during the 660-80 only to head way out to lunch again with their 7x series. It boggles the mind and makes it hard to purchase when AMD is offering great deals on their end /w similar performance.
hamiltus - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
So my main question is if the GTX 970 is a good upgrade from the GTX 670 for 1440p/4K gaming?coldpower27 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
This is a solid upgrade, just thinking if this is worth it over GTX 670 as well. Slightly more power consumption for much greater performance and similar idle performance numbers.970 has a nice ring to it. :)