The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTGRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Our final game once again sees the GTX 970 start out trailing the R9 290XU, only to start pulling ahead once the resolution drops. At 1440p it’s practically a tie, and at 1080p it becomes a clear victory for the GTX 970.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that at an average performance gap of 10%, this is the game with the smallest performance difference between the GTX 980 and GTX 970. Compared to ROP throughput and memory bandwidth, shader and texture throughput isn’t being tested here by as much, which helps to negate some of the GTX 970’s innate disadvantage.
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Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It will apparently be delivered via a vBIOS update, judging from what is being said on EVGA's forum.justaviking - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Excellent. Thank you.Gunbuster - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Too bad it seems ACX 2.0 is a loud ass cooler, have used EVGA in the past but that moves it off my list.Qwertilot - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
You'd think they should be able to get the fans to at the very least spin down a lot further than that at idle - there seems to be at least three 970 cards capable of running on purely passive cooling at idle now. (Asus, MSI and Palit.).maximumGPU - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Very tempting for us 670 owners!Although will look for models with quieter coolers. Seems silly to have a loud one with such a low TDP.
Dahak - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Did I miss the information about the compatibility issues that was indicated in the 980 review? or is it going to be in another article?JarredWalton - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It was briefly discussed on page 3:http://www.anandtech.com/show/8568/the-geforce-gtx...
Basically, it was mostly a problem with the ASRock motherboard Ryan uses for GPU testing.
sweeper765 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
So EVGA put all this work into lowering fan power consumption but forgot about idle noise? I find this perplexing . And i believe they had this same problem with other older models as well.Also i don't like the idea of passive cooling. Running the card at 50C for a long time is not good for longevity. I had a passive Gigabyte card in the past that after a few years was showing colored pixels on the screen.
Better to use a low rpm (<1000) for quiet operation. You're not going to hear the difference anyway because you have other components making some kind of noise in the case.
Tetracycloide - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
In fairness, idle noise is much easier, just a BIOS change. Load noise required hardware revisions.The_Assimilator - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Why use two 6-pin PCIe power connectors when a single 8-pin would do the job just fine? Would certainly cut down on the BOM, and of course cable clutter.