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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Laststop311 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
330 for this is a steal. Very few cases one even needs a 980. Even so I am still buying the 980 I keep my hpus for a long time, still using radeon 5870 nowThe-Fox - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Thanks Ryan ! great article, enjoyed reading it as much as I did the one on the GTX 980.GTX 970 proves to be an excellent card in terms of VFM, its a rare event in the high end GFX card market.
I would love to see GTX 970 in an SLI benchmark and see how it handles UHD (read 4K) games.
With its price point and performance it begs for a dual SLI setup.
Nfarce - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Guru3D has done it. It's highly impressive.Nfarce - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
I've got two reference cooler EVGA 970s (superclocked) coming from NewEgg on Tuesday. I'm not a big overclocker on GPUs as I'm on air and want all possible heat blown out the back, but can't wait. Coming from a single 680 and having recently moved up to 1440p, and not having to upgrade my Corsair 750W gold PS, it's just an absolute zero brainer.Great review Ryan and thanks for continuing to show older games like Crysis Warhead and Grid 2 (which I use as a reference to compare with Grid Autosport benches)!
Scimitar11 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Great article as usual. I just signed up to ask: Will you do any reviews/comparisons of the semi-reference cards with the cheaper blower style coolers for the 970? There are quite a few options out there (at least two non-ACX EVGA cards for example). I would love to know just how much difference there is in temps and noise, and possibly performance between the various cooler types.AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
Ryan, are you using the horrendously bad stock AMD coolers for the 290X noise and temperature readings?kwrzesien - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
Looks like NVIDIA did pretty awesome dealing with the surprise that they had to produce another generation on TSMC 28nm. Frankly these will probably be the best cards made for years to come since they really have 28nm figured out and Maxwell is bringing huge performance/watt. It will be interesting to see if they even make a 960 - would it be a further crippled GM204 or something else, maybe the first 20nm chip?So in classic AnandTech style it would be awesome to get an article on the inside story at NVIDIA about what they have gone through with Apple sucking up the first batch of 20nm at TSMC. I know they made some public noise about it - and think about it from the corporate perspective - they were used to getting first dibs on each die shrink and using that in the top-tier products. Now they are stuck a node behind, they may have to prioritize Tegra and mobile chips on 20nm first and leave desktop parts always a year behind. If that keeps workstation parts behind as well I can see why they would be pissed.
ppi - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
When can we expect image quality tests?mr.techguru - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Why you did not mention EVGA has been caught with there chips being not aligned on the heat sink correctly..(Tho, they replied with it being how its suppose to be).Asus is always just a solid company to fall back on..
and gigabyte is generally the same way.
As for the 970's... MSI>Gigabyte>ASUS>EVGA.
EVGA's Problem: http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/evga-geforce-gtx-...
Everything you need to know about the MSI 970: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_g...
Gigaplex - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Neither of those links work