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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Kalessian - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Is it really safe to overclock the memory like that when there aren't any heatsinks on them?Also, 1st?
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
As long as you're not giving them additional voltage (which you can't do on this card): yes. GDDR5 does not consume all that much power, even if it is relatively more than DDR3. The airflow off of the fans is plenty for stock voltage.Viewgamer - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Why no Mantle benchmarks for Thief ?winterspan - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I'm assuming because this is an Nvidia review...eanazag - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
No mantle is likely because it didn't give a great showing last time in the AMD mantle review. If I remember correctly, Thief maybe even had a performance regression with Mantle being used.Ammaross - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Because Mantle only has benefit in CPU-capped performance. When you run benchmarks on an i7 or better, Mantle has no tangible benefit and sometimes has regressions.Viewgamer - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Or even Mantle benchmarks for BF4 for that matter ?Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Apologies. The Mantle results have to be added manually since our graphing system can't handle multiple results for the same card automatically. I had actually entered in the data but neglected to regenerate the graphs.SeanJ76 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Sounds like your not using EVGA PrecisonX 4.2.1, you can add as much voltage as you like to the 970 GTX FTW.........idiot.....P39Airacobra - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
Ok first of all EVGA Precision or the type of software has nothing to do with that, Also he has a valid concern about the V-Ram temps and the VRM. Also don't call people idiots! That's my Job! IDIOT!