The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTThe Test
Quickly touching on the subject of compatibility, as readers of last week’s GTX 980 review may recall, we had initial compatibility issues with our GTX 970 FTW that prevented us from including it in our review. Since then NVIDIA has been able to isolate the issue and has put together the 334.16 drivers, which include a fix for the problem we were seeing. So we are now up and running. NVIDIA tells us that the issue only impacted certain motherboards (such as our ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional), and as far as we can tell that appears to be correct, as we have not seen any other reports of compatibility issues.
Moving on, for the purposes of our testing we will be looking at both the GTX 970 FTW in its shipping configuration and in a reference clocked configuration. EVGA has given us the reference GTX 970 vBIOS to flash to this card (taking advantage of the triple BIOS feature), allowing us to turn it into a standard GTX 970 for that part of our testing.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 290 AMD Radeon R9 280X AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6970 EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW ACX 2.0 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 344.07 Beta NVIDIA Release 344.16 Beta AMD Catalyst 14.300.1005 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1U1 Pro |
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Daniel Egger - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I love this card and am really excited. BUT if this cannot run on a single PCIe connector despite being 145W only that is a real deal breaker as I'm definitely not going to replace my excellent PSU just because some moron decided to plan in some additional headroom...Razorbak86 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
"single PCIe connector... excellent PSU"Good one. LOL
wetwareinterface - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
if your psu doesn't have 2 6 pin pci-e connectors it can't be that excellent. the lepa 500 watt is $36 and will run the 970 no problem and is a decent supply. i shudder to think what you have if it can't handle this card.Daniel Egger - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
An efficient quiet low power PSU from "be quiet!" for my HTPC which would be perfectly capable of dealing with the GTX 970. There're actually many PSUs which only have 1 PCIe connector because that's the norm not the execption that you'll need at most one. So I take it that all of you "shuddering" all day thinking of what horrible PSUs others might have, have their high end gaming rigs and don't give a crap about silence and/or efficiency -- good for you but maybe schedule a reality check sometime.maximumGPU - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Yeah, but that "moron" who planned additional headroom is catering to the needs of the biggest market for these cards, who are gamers likely to overclock at some point. Not the niche need of using it in an htpc case with a low power single pcie psu.D. Lister - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
You could use an adapter to get an extra 6-pin connector, which should work fine considering the low power draw of the 970. That is, if your excellent PSU has an HDD power dongle to spare.</snark>pixelstuff - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Looking at the 970 cards on Newegg, any idea why all brands have the 2x DVI, 1x DisplayPort configuration? While nVidia.com lists the 970 specs as having 3x DisplayPort, 1 DVI port.I was hoping to get a 970 with 3 display ports, so I'm wondering what is going on.
yefi - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
The overclock on this is pretty weak. I get 1314Mhz core with a max boost of 1554Mhz with the MSI Frozr 970. I see reviewers hitting ~1500Mhz also.mr.techguru - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
It seems the ACX Cooler similar to the EVGA 760 ACX has a design/manufacturing flew even the 2.0 version has the pipelines vs GPU position flew ; after throughly reading the reviews & users feedback ( EVGA GeForce GTX 970 ACX has misaligned GPU vs heatpipes) : http://www.overclock.net/t/1514624/eteknix-possibl... and http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/evga-geforce-gtx-... and http://forums.evga.com/m/tm.aspx?m=2221919&p=1 and http://www.eteknix.com/evga-gtx-970-feature-manufa... Therefore I would rather go with another brand Like the Asus Strix Series ; MSI Gaming Series or the Gegabyte G1 Gaming Series .. Less Risk Especially the warranty is RMA. As soon they are available at Stock update asap to order one .. Meanwhile Reason why they did not show the PCB of the ACX 2.0 and they showed us the FTW. I was interested to purchase the ACX version but now In a dilemma since the issue has not been mentioned in a tech site they I usually always trust!bsim500 - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Good review. Is there going to be a GTX 960 to fill the rather large gap between the GTX 970 and 750Ti?