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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dj christian - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
What type of fans does it use? Ball bearing or sleeve bearing?bardolious - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
EVGA uses double ball bearing fans. That's where the extra noise comes from. Much noisier at idle but far more durable. I've really been pleased with the ACX cooler on my 770.Chloiber - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Actually, the noisy ACX on my 770 is the reason I won't be buying another EVGA anytime soon. They have given me a silent BIOS, which is great, but the ACX is still by far the loudest noise maker in my PC. It has also been proven by countless reviews: the idle and even load noise levels were higher than those of the stock GTX 770. And they are making the same mistake AGAIN - I really can't believe it.Well, they seem to come around after seeing all the competitors which seem to understand what it means to deliver silent cards.
The ACX cooler isn't bad, it's actually rather good - the only problem is that they never understood what a "silent" card means. They were always going for lower temperature over lower noise levels - even in idle, which made absolutely no sense.
Iketh - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
enjoy the other brands' fans going out in 1-2 yearsalso if you read the article (updated 9/26, two days before your post), evga is releasing a passive idle bios which makes your whole post pointless
creed3020 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
In all honesty I cannot see how comparing a _reference_ R9 290X on Uber to this particular 970 is valid.We really need a similar open air cooled R9 290X to really see how power, temps, and noise compare....Everyone knows that AMD's reference blower for the 290X just isn't up to the task of cooling that beast.
haukionkannel - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
True. The R9 290 reference cooler is one of the worst options to chose and non reference has been much better! But still 970 is hard nail in 290X skin!Lithium - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
YepBut reference 290X still selling and used to make price as low as 449$.
So its valid
creed3020 - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
Good point. I guess some manufacturers just want that entry product in their stack of offerings and go with the reference design.Thanks Ryan for the hard work on the nVidia 980/970 release, these articles were excellent. In the future perhaps consider a followup test comparing a bunch of cards to more so evaluate their coolers and OC potential. That could be very interesting taking some of the top and mid cards from each manufacturer and doing a quantitative analysis across the board.
AkibWasi - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
970 has 52 FP64 cuda cores right ? why block diagram doesn't show those ?Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
NVIDIA does not include the FP64 CUDA cores in their diagrams for consumer chips. This has been the case as far back as GK104.