The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTTotal War: Rome 2
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.
Yet again we have a situation where the winner and loser is effectively decided by the resolution in use. GTX 970 will trail at 4K, only to take a slight lead at 1440p. As we’ve stated before 1440p and 1080p are going to be the sweet spots for GTX 970 based on its $329 price tag, so for GTX 970 this means it’s winning or tying in the resolutions where it matters the most.
Of course if you factor in the FTW overclock then the point becomes moot. With the GTX 970 and R9 290XU tracking so close together, the higher clock speeds mean that a GTX 970 card can push ahead of R9 290XU on average.
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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.