The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTBioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
Bioshock Infinite immediately turns the tables on AMD, and outside of a near-tie at 4K the GTX 970 takes a significant lead here. At both 1440p and 1080p the GTX 970 clears the R9 290XU by 21%, and even against the GTX 780 it enjoys quite a lead.
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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.