Gadgetory

everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're reviewing EVGA is a brand-new GTX 970 hybrid video card with the ASA tech cooler slapped on it as found on the 980 TI hybrid and the other hybrid series coolers right next to me over here is the 970 SSC these are both GTX 970 cards one uses the AC X 2.0 dual fan cooler which is pretty comparable to most other dual fan coolers on the market and the other one uses the CLC as you can see here plus a vrm blower fan so it's a normal reference blower fan or squirrel cage fan however you want to call it and that's for cooling the vrm and the vram and then for the GPU itself the die it's cooled by a CLC provided by ASA Tech in this case so for the specs the GTX 970 hybrid ships at 11 40 megahertz stock and that boosts to 1279 megahertz its stock its base clock is actually lower than what you'll find on the cheaper 970 SSC also an EVGA card and that ships at 11 90 megahertz so you've got a 50 megahertz jump here from the hybrid to the SSC and a $50 price gap so what you're paying for ultimately is the ASA tech cooler on there that is a CLC it should drop the temperatures pretty heavily and we tested it it does you'll see in our tests in a moment here and that's comparable to the 980ti hybrid which also uses an ASA tech at CLC and the thin here with the ACE tech CLC on these cards is that they are tuned for GPUs so the GPU die is actually a different size pretty different from the CPU die and the main thing with the GPU cold plates that are on these particular devices anyway is that they use an extrusion in the copper so the copper cold plates a circle and that mounts to the top of the GPU or the CPU if you have a CPU cooler the difference here is the extrusion so there's a big piece of copper that extrudes out of the cold plate and that helps sync the heat the additional heat of the GPU it fits the physical size of the die better than CPU cooler might do if you adapt a CPU cooler to with GPU and that's what makes the hybrid series cards historically pretty good at cooling but we'll see if that's true obviously with the 970 hybrid going forward in a moment here the big difference between that and the other cards on the market that are called by CL C's or if you buy an end Exe kraken adapter or a corsair adapter the g10 of the hg 10 adaptors and mount a cpu cooler to it the difference there is that those do not have the extrusion found on this GPU cooler on the cold plate so you will actually see a pretty sizable performance difference in terms of cooling ability so that's the core specs here the radiator is a 120 millimeter fan radiator you've got the CLC on the dive erm blower fan for the VR M&V ram and the core clock is 50 megahertz lower than the SSC other than that everything is pretty much the same as any other GTX 970 you'll find in the market same TM user ops all that stuff architecture does not change between the different brand cards so here's what we're testing today we're doing game tests for the FPS and that's primarily comparing these two devices but there is a third EVGA device that I had temporarily on loan that's at 10 50 megahertz which means it is a reference clocked GTX 970 so that'll give us a baseline for how much difference there really is in these devices but ultimately you're seeing a couple percent difference between two cards like this where there are 50 megahertz gap so we're gonna focus more heavily on power thermals and of course overclocking that's a big focus here so let's forge ahead into that content and see how everything performs for all the test methodology and discussion on how the testing works how we lay it out hit the article in the link in the description below that is the full written review which contains a lot more information on this video but we do recap it all here quickly starting with fallout 4 the GTX 970 SSC predictably outperforms the hybrid and that's a result of the 50 megahertz clock rate gap on the stock configuration the difference is about 2.5% average FPS which comes out to 2 FPS on the 1080p configuration as we venture into thermals and overclocked in the picture will become more clear as to the hybrid potential value but as it stands from charge it's a tough sell for a marginally lower FPS on the same model card for 50 bucks more 400 total Assassin's Creed syndicate is the next one to benchmark the results here somewhat mirrored the fallout 4 testing producing a 2.8 2% Delta between average FPS of the SSC and the hybrid and again that translates in this case to about 2 FPS average it's measurable and well outside of margin of error it's not within margin of error so that is a definitive gap but it's just it's small it's just an arguably small if you're looking at the hybrid it's probably also worth looking at the air-cooled 390x cards that are about 400 to 420 dollars and in that instance as we discuss and analyze in our acs benchmark or syndicate benchmark 390 acts actually significantly under performs against the 970 cards and even against them cheaper 970 SSC and that's just an optimization issue but that changes depending on game and you can check all of our standalone independent game benchmarks to learn more about the value of cards outside of the 970 s we're comparing directly today Metro last light char gets a little more interesting back when we briefly had an EVGA 970 10 50 megahertz card which was provided by JP our we ran it through a few of our then standard bench games and Metro is one of them the 10 50 megahertz card here in ml lands at a full 14 point two percent lower average FPS than the SSC model price just $40 more and that's a performance gap that becomes noticeable that creates more than a 10 FPS swing between the two at 1080p the hybrid lands at nine point three percent faster than the 10 50 megahertz card and at 1440p the swing is the difference between 50 FPS at 10 50 megahertz 57 FPS at 11 90 megahertz it's certainly noticeable and at 55 FPS with the 11 40 megahertz hybrid card so you are definitely advantaged with those pre overclocked devices in this game for sure moving on to thermals and power the GTX 970 hybrid is now the coolest device on our bench edging out that on ATT I hybrid by about two point three seven Celsius but makes sense because the 980ti hybrid is a larger chip and it's hotter it's more powerful chip as well so it does take more energy to power runs hotter for that reason and that's why you see this gap the 970 hybrid is definitely at the top of our chart now though for thermal performance and it's not until we get into overclocking which is in more detail in a moment that the 970 hybrid passes the 980 I hybrid stock thermals landing at 23 0.72 Celsius still remarkably low and nothing at all to worry about even with high OCS as we achieved but it's it's really just worth pointing out that the thermals here were have from the SSC that's it's about a 90 percent performance Delta between the 20 point 5 3 Celsius hybrid in the 54 point 1 5 Celsius SSC it's the 2x cooling gain and even as we look into overclock temperatures of these two cards 13 20 megahertz base 15:46 boost on the hybrid the gap remains 77% versus the as a/c stock output so there's there's still a gain here no matter which way you look at it you're certainly paying for that though it's a minimum of 50 dollars over the SSC's cost certainly more for the lower end cards and whether there's ROI on that for you as a user depends on your use cases depends on if you're cramming it into an SFF build or a hotter case or a shoebox build in those instances then certainly the temperature is advantageous but other than that unless you're in a particularly warm ambient environment the performance Delta is not necessarily something that you need to spend the extra money on it just depends on what you're going for the GTX 970 hybrid at 11:40 megahertz the stock configuration draws 263 point 5 3 watts which is five point eight six percent less than the eleven ninety megahertz 970 SSC card even as we look to overclocked setups which lands the hybrid at 13 20 megahertz base and 1546 max clock the liquid cooled card at 279 point four three watts is more efficient than the 1519 megahertz SSC overclock at 299 point four nine watts in talking to EVGA this is primarily a result of the sses beefier power management setup but we think it can also be attributed to power efficiency gains from moving to liquid for example the reduction of leakage from capacitors you're losing less power to inefficiency because of the overall cooler temperature the similarly priced MSI r9 390x just give some perspective here that's a 420 dollar card that draws 416 point 3 watts which is about 44.94 percent more than the 970 hybrid and thermals of this particular 390x are approximately eighty one point three eight percent higher than the hybrid and that is a pretty well cooled card using the MSI's frozer fan set up moving to overclocking the GTX 970 hybrid allows a power offset of ten percent as does the SSC card and we overclocked and tested both each with independent tables here so here's the hybrids table the final resting clock rate was fifteen forty six megahertz all totaled and this is the boosted r8 when under gaming workloads the clock rate as suggested through basic math one eighty plus eleven forty was thirteen twenty megahertz as the base and we left the memory clock at five hundred megahertz offset which is where we stopped on most cars voltage remains one point two one two throughout the process one point two and two volts the SSC landed at fifteen nineteen megahertz a fair bit lower than the fifteen forty six of the hybrid and that's even taking into account the higher pre overclock of that as a C this produces a swing that shifts the hybrid into territory of a higher clock rate and thus a higher average FPS ahead of the SSC just barely a couple percent we were unable to clarify the C's memory very high it seems to get stuck around three hundred megahertz beyond which point the drivers would fail and the hybrid is of our two cards clearly the superior overclock or in this instance and this is likely partly attributable to the advantage thermal management but can also boil down to things like binning and the Silicon Lottery performance puts the hybrid about two percent ahead of the SSC when it's overclocked when they're both overclocked you can see those charts here or look more in-depth in the article link in the description below so is it worth it is the 970 hybrid actually worth $400 this is a nice clean cut as some of the other reviews the 980ti hybrid I was a pretty big advocate of when it came to reducing those thermals of the 980ti because a warmer card in general and you can actually gain performance from that card that's set up and it was running 700 bucks which at the time was about $50 more than the average 980 I so in that case it's still a $50 gap but you're just you're spending so much more that it's it's a smaller percentage gain in price so it doesn't feel as bad in this case you're potentially going from 320 $350 up to 400 that's a much more noticeable gap so it's harder to defend the price to jump and I'll read what I wrote in the review just because I think it sums things up pretty well for most users we would recommend a normal air-cooled GTX 970 but we would strongly recommend that you got a pre overclocked one like that's a C it doesn't have to be EVGA there's a lot of other good cards out there to MSI's mine so many gaming is basically the same thing as this and it's the same price so you like how it looks better than just by that but plenty of good cards out there issues MSI get good by EGA they all have cards that are very comparable and those are all about $350 this is still 400 it's clocked a bit lower so you'll have to overclock to achieve the 1190 megahertz of most of these 350 dollar cards but that's really a trivial feat anyone can do a 50 megahertz offset on this probably don't even have to increase the power percentage or the voltage or anything like that but for most users we recommend the 350 dollar card just on the status of price alone even though the performance is about the same the thermal performance of this is nearly two times what this is it dissipates 90% of the heat so you're ending up in the 20 Celsius range versus forties or fifties depending on the card and that is massive so that swings things a bit that makes it so that if you want a shoe box set up like a shuttle PC or an SFF bill with maybe a Silverstone SGO a it or similar box that's geo-9 in those cases it would actually make a good deal of sense to buy something like this if you're not trying to buy a high-end 980ti or 980 with liquid you can buy something like in mine 70 with liquid and those cases it makes sense only because of one thing and that's with the SFF box is you really you're running hotter case temperatures in general because you think about it everything's closer together especially mitx or m ATX boards so because everything's closer together the GPU of the CPU will sort of symbiotically exchange heat and warm each other up the whole case warms up ram warms up this is a big one that people don't think about the chipset warms up and in those scenarios outputting through a radiator like this will drop your thermal substantially for all neighboring components and that is worth considering otherwise you kind of you want to blow our fan set up because like this blower fan or the reference blower fan it will push the heat outside of the case rather than using the push fans which can dissipate a lot of the heat up and out of the sides of the card at which point it's just going back into the case and if you're in a tight case recirculates gets hot not a great thing so overall the 970 hybrid is the best overclock or of these two particular cards that we tested I have not tested the G one yet it has far superior thermals any card we've ever tested except maybe the 980ti hybrid which is very close couple Celsius and for that reason this is an impressive setup but you can still be pretty happy at the 50 Celsius range delta T with an air-cooled card because that's certainly not a dangerous temperature so it just depends on your use case if you are one of those users who needs the reduced thermals or you just want them for longevity reasons then certainly consider the 970 hybrid it's a good performer and if you can afford the 50 bucks it's worth it for those cases if you're a user who's an average gamer you're never gonna overclock you're running maybe a mid tower set up then air is just fine for you if you're looking specifically at a 970 then any air $350 card with a pre overclock would be a good consideration do check our independent game benchmarks by independent I mean primarily that they are not reviews of GPUs the reviews of game performance and see where each card fall to figure out if you should buy one or not so that is the 970 hybrid review check the link the description for more information 400 bucks 11 40 megahertz base easily overclocked overclocked very high and cools very efficiently a little bit ugly on the faceplate I'll I'll admit I don't really talk thermals but I don't like this faceplate too much but EVGA has output different face plates and the fast in the past so hopefully they do that again either way though this is just a faceplate so not a big deal to me personally so that's all for this one if you liked this video or this content in general hit the patreon link the post roll video and thanks for watching thanks for supporting the channel I'll see you all next time