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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thesid - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
I have a rig with i2600K and 16gigs of 12800ddr3 ram and a gtx 570, if i upgrade to the 970 gtx will it be bottlenecked by the rest of the components?atl - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
Under power consumption, i would like to have comparison of GPU only consumption also, not whole system.SeanJ76 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Yeah that 970GTX FTW is a damn good card. I was shocked at how close the performance gap was of the 970 FTW and the 980(although this has always been the case with the FTW versions).sheriff12 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I'm MAD! When I first looked at the Gigabyte GTX 970 on amazon.com a month ago, it was $308, now it's $348. Just because sales are good, does that mean they should gouge the consumer for all they can?thelategamer - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
Here's my honest review of the GTX 970 and upgrading to SLI 970s rather than getting underperforming 1070s and 1080s - http://www.thelategamer.com/video-game-review/late...