The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2014.
Crysis 3 is another game where the outcome between the R9 290XU and GTX 970 depends on the resolution. At 4K Low the GTX 970 trails the R9 290XU by 10%, only for the two to get within a frame of each other at 1440p High. Past that it’s all NVIDIA at 1080p. This once again neatly illustrates that AMD still holds a general resolution scaling advantage over NVIDIA and the Maxwell 2 architecture. Though since we’re looking at a $329 card that’s cheaper than any 4K monitor, that’s not an advantage that’s going to be of much value in the real world.
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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.