Gadgetory

well guys EVGA has done it again bringing another hybrid card to their lineup they've already got the 980 980ti and Titan X hybrid cards well now we're taking a look at their brand new 970 hybrid the lik max to 120 and 240 from enter max is another awesome choice of a io liquid coolers for gamers and enthusiasts without breaking the bank patented shunt channel technology provides extra layer of cooling capability click the link below to find out more I'll admit I was a little confused when they asked me if I wanted to check out the 970 hybrid because I thought the card is over a year old you've already got a 980 980 TI and Titan X hybrid does it make sense for someone to buy a water-cooled 970 instead of taking that extra money and putting in to say a 980 well when I asked them that they responded with well the 970 hybrid is only 399 dollars making the 980 even a reference style 980 $100 more expensive than this option maybe this makes sense so I thought yeah definitely worth taking a look at to see if this thing at a hundred bucks less than a 980 makes sense now I am NOT doing a specific 980 comparison with this today I'm gonna be doing that in the future because if I did a 980 comparison today and then videoed like I'm gonna do today about its overclocking and water cooling setup on here the video would have been way too long as I fear this video is already gonna be long so there will be a future video about this thing vs. 980 and other brand options specifically from AMD in the same price point to see how this thing holds up given its a water-cooled card that is about a year and two months old so make sure you guys stay tuned for that but anyway here it is the GTX 970 but you might notice one there's no backplate and two it is the small style 970 it's pretty much the ITX card that they put an extended cooler on hung the fan off the back of it and then you've got a fan that is cooling all the components on the PCB including the VRMs and then of course you've got a radiator that is keeping the core itself nice and cool now I'm okay with there not being a backplate on this one and I'm gonna let it slide because we've given up the backplate for a water cooler and kept the price point affordable yeah a backplate might have made this thing cost ten bucks more but there's gonna be some give-and-take I guess I would have liked to have seen a backplate I really really would have but I kind of understand why they didn't do it on this one oh well anyway the front of it here does have a blower style fan which as I mentioned it's going to blow air over the components that are on the PCB and then we do have a really nice technically it's a faux aluminum it kind of looks like an aluminum shroud on here it is plastic but it's very realistic in fact I couldn't really tell at first if it was real aluminum or not so I emailed EVGA and asked them is that real or not it is faux for real fake it's not real but whatever inputs are the same you got to DVI is you got an hdmi 2.0 as well as a DisplayPort and then just like standard 970 because this is a standard reference card not even like an SC or an SSD or a for the win this is just straight-up mini ITX 970 form factor with like I said an extended cooler on here so nothing custom about this whatsoever which made me wonder why did you water cool the one that's not got any of the additional power phases or any of that stuff is it gonna matter well guys let's go ahead and find out right now okay so what I'm really interested in today's video is just to see how far we can actually push this thing and does the water cooling really matter when it comes to the 970 so I'm not gonna be running through my entire gambit of games and stuff that are normally benchmark simply because we've done so many different 970 reviews and given the fact that this is basically an nvidia standard PCB even the short PCB I'm not going to waste a lot of your viewer time I know the questions here really are does it overclock really well does the over this the water cooling really matter and how cool does it really run so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna be using some valley benchmark here and then we will do one real-world benchmark because you guys want to see more of those real-world benchmarks and we will take a look at well look at battlefront because I think battlefront although it's a new game it's using an older engine a lot of graphics cards can really push battlefront and I thought we'd see how it performs all the way up to 4k on this graphics card now right now you can see we're idling at 27 degrees Celsius which is actually very very good let's do this now let's go ahead and run valley here it's let it run for just a few seconds actually let's see what this card is boosting up to by itself and then we will go ahead and we will see how well this thing is able to overclock now I'm using EVGA precision 16 and the reason for that is I want to make sure that by using something like MSI Afterburner there's no missing function sometimes EVGA cards like the kingpin card there's a lot of functions that are unlocked in EVGA considering it's their in-house software I want to make sure that we are using you know the we're getting full potential out of this card by not maybe somehow limiting it by using msi afterburner so valley benchmarks what I'm using here extreme HD which is basically 1080p and all the settings pretty much are maxed out when you do extreme HD and then we're gonna go ahead and see how this thing does now there is also going to be an overlay on screen here up on the left hand side it's gonna be probably a little bit difficult to see simply because it is kind of over laying on top of valley there and you can see it boosted up to thirteen hundred and fifty-four megahertz memory clock is at 3500 six and the GPU temperature is sitting at about 35 C so we'll let this go here for just a couple of minutes maybe I'll fast forward he'll let this go for a couple of minutes and we'll see what the max temperature ended up being as you can see - the memory usage is only sitting at about about one gigabyte of usage it's just pretty typical for a synthetic benchmark like this it's it's all on a track it's free rendered and it's not going to be using up too much of your vram after all man it is a 970 which means we do only have 3.5 gigabytes of high speed V RAM available to the card so if you start pushing really high-end resolutions like 4k and stuff you might start bumping up into that cat temperature sitting right now at 39 C it's probably gonna peak right around here based on some experiences I've already had with this car because I have been playing around this card obviously prior to this video I like to give you guys raw impressions and reactions and stuff but at the same time I kind of got to know what I'm getting myself into make sure the card is working make sure it's not dead or needs to be are made and as you can see here 13 54 megahertz is where we've pretty much peaked out here it's stuck there though it hasn't been fluctuating at all GPU boost 2.0 it's sitting about where the air-cooled card would be I you know I do have multiple EVGA SSC 970 s here which are custom PCBs and they do also sit right around the same mark when it comes to GPU boost so the water cooling initially is not really making it go any farther in terms of GPU boost 2.0 but of course we care about how far we can push this thing and does the water cooling really affect your max overclock so that's kind of the point of today's video also - you can see we did hit 41 C for a minute there it's also important to note that this room is closed right now there's no air flow into this room no air conditioner so the temperature is going to probably rise a little bit considering the fact that we are you know in a closed room here now one other thing I want to do real quick is I want to go ahead and run the synthetic benchmark here get a score because I want to see how far the score also improves when it comes to you know the overclocking on this all right so the test is done here are our numbers and average FPS of 57.8 score of 24 18 minimum of twenty eight point eight and a max of 108 point eight there's a lot of eights here eight eighty so anyway that is our baseline temperatures stuck to about 42 C which I'm actually surprising and go higher than that concern in this room is warming up even though it's December it is gonna be 85 degrees Fahrenheit here today good old California all right so let's go ahead and close this and let's do some benchmarking what I also like about this card is just how fast the temperatures come down as you can see we're already down to 36 and it will go all the way back down into about 30 flat high 20s no problem whatsoever now the fan just like on the 980 hybrid and 980ti hybrid this controls the on-board fan that is actually on the PCB not the fan that's on the radiator I do still wish that they would have made the fan on the radiator controllable as that's going to more or less control your temperatures not the fan on the PCB so that's something I really wish would have been the case although this is at adding active cooling to the V RMS and it's blowing air over the PCB which is keeping all those components cool so I wish that there would have been like other brands are doing allowing you to control the fan on the radiator a few moments later so you can see right here the numbers are 1560 megahertz it's a plus 206 on the core really plus 205 is where I where I considered it to be the most stable but my OCD was not liking 1559 on the core so I mean at 1560 memory overclock was 37 58 total sets a plus 250 on the memory which was giving us was giving us about a 7500 and 16 megahertz effective ram speech is pretty good you can see our max temperature here is 42 C I've had this thing running for a little while now doing some stability testing in fact it's been running for about about 20 minutes now and then I restarted the test for this particular take what we're gonna do now is go ahead and hit f9 to start the benchmark and then we are going to see how much the score and the averages and stuff actually improved if at all so we'll go ahead and fast forward this here so we don't waste too much of your valuable YouTube watching time okay so you can see our score came up to 26 ninety-one average FPS came up quite a few to sixty four point three minimum thirty one point seven and a max all the way up to 120 two point two so you can see we gained quite a bit by overclocking this card alright it's going to check out some battlefront and see how this thing can do so the settings here in Star Wars we'll just do a quick test here at 1080p 1440 and 4k everything is on high settings here whatever the high preset is I'm not gonna do that's great let's do Ultra we do the ultra preset so FPS is looking pretty good here I mean but the game is not very demanding which is one of the reasons why we're doing this yeah I only hide around the corner on me oh oh no no I you about to kill a friend so you can see we're getting well over a hundred FPS here in 1080p mode constantly over 100 FPS we've got some dips here in the lower hundreds let's do this now let's go ahead and change this to 1440p and see how it does dill over 60fps it looks like but FPS as you can see even in 1440p is really really good not have any problems playing here I killed myself all right as do 4k see how 4k is doing a single 970 playing some 4k here it looks like we're chilling in the 40s that's actually really good everything looks so sharp and so pretty this game is so freakin pretty I swear I love how pretty this game is down to the 30s in this room here's a lot of lighting in here though I like first-person view a lot of people give me a hard time like no you should play in third-person I like first-person that's why it's an FPS not a TPS it's in a third-person shooter fps biatch well I think that ought to give you guys some ideas of what to expect with the performance of this 970 so let's get out of here with some final thoughts you know this is a really interesting time for this card to come out if he asked me because the 970 has been under a lot of fire not only because of the crossbar issue with the RAM making it 3.5 gigabyte sonam a true 4 gigabyte card but the fact that AMD's 300 series really targeted the 970 in trying to kick the 970 off of its perch as being the best bang for buck graphics card when it comes to system builders and gamers no I was really surprised that EVGA went the route of making a hybrid 970 considering the card is over a year old I mean the card came out in September of 2014 well over a year ago so why bring the hybrid series to the 970 well obviously that's because there's a lot of benefit still to owning a 970 today and considering they already have hybrids on the 980 and 980 TI and tight next cards it really made sense for them to do this now I was concerned when they first hit me up about this card and asking me to do this review was is there a way I could do this review and have it not just be nothing but me talking about it didn't make sense to put a water cooler on a 970 but considering they kept the price at 399 for this water-cooled card yeah it doesn't have a backplate but I think I'll let it slide on this one considering we can give it the backplate get a water cooling solution on here this kind of overclocking these kinds of temperatures the temperatures never went above 43 degrees Celsius I think now a water cooling solution at this price point of 399 does make a lot of sense now it's $100 less than a 980 but this thing overclocked is giving you 980 performance in fact it's very very close to 980 overclocked performance it's not that far off now I'm definitely gonna have to do a video in the future where I take this card and put it up against a 980 now obviously the 980 will beat it stock for stock and once you overclock the 980 it will pull ahead of the 971 overclock even this water-cooled card but it's important to take a look at price to performance ratio and I really want to compare what the FPS per dollar is between a 980 and the 970 hybrid it's definitely worth taking a look at like I said $100 cheaper and you're getting this kind of performance so if you guys want to see that video make sure you let me know in the comments if you guys are interested in that performance per dollar and then we'll do the same thing with like this card versus a 390 considering this is right around the price of a 390 on AMD side in fact I even told EVGA that they might have shot themselves in the foot by this video proving that you don't need custom high-end PCBs to get really good overclocking unless you're gonna be doing something like ln2 or serious voltage modding but even then you would be running not even necessarily water you'd be running like liquid nitrogen or even chill system some sort on your card to keep those temperatures under check once you start getting like 2 volts of you know GPU core time to get out of here guys thanks for watching we got a lot of cool stuff coming and like I said I've got a complete system giveaway I'm gonna be doing so make sure you subscribe so that you can check that out it's gonna be a lot of fun we're gonna build it we're gonna see how it does and then we're going to give the thing away including a monitor keyboard and mouse you don't want to miss that alright guys thanks for watching it as always I will see you in the next video