Gadgetory

as usual invidious recent graphics card launch was dominated by coverage of their new flagship gtx 980 and we were guilty of focusing on it too but I think in some ways the lower priced GTX 970 could actually be much more interesting from a regular gamers perspective especially if its performance is similar enough to its beast of a big brother welcome to our GTX 970 review featuring the Strix direct co2 from isus Coolermaster Neptune series CPU coolers are available in a variety of radiator sizes to perfectly suit your next build click now to learn more we'll start with a brief overview of how the reference GTX 970 stacks up against the GTX 980 the memory config is identical it's got the same 256-bit memory bus with the same four gigs of VRAM clocked at the same 7 gigahertz but the core is where NVIDIA has opted to cut their second tier card down this time around the GTX 970 gets 13 SMS compared to 16 on the 980 giving it about 80% as many cuda cores and texture units and it comes with a lower clock speed out of the box but that's about it and Asus takes care of one of these things right off the bat by delivering their non-reference card with a factory increased boost clock of 1253 megahertz actually higher than a reference 980 of course as usual we aren't going to be running the card as factories needs anyway so we're more interested in how the rest of us uses alterations including that their latest version of GPU tweak their overclocking utility supports automatic GPU BIOS updates on certain cards now are going to affect the performance we'll start with a general physical overview a soos has increased the height of the card especially near the sli connector that supports up to 3-way SLI configurations they've changed out the dual 6 pin PCI II connectors for a single 8 pin connector they've changed the stylized backplate to a sexy brushed aluminum job' they've swapped out the in my opinion much better IO config for a more conventional one with DVID dvi-i HDMI oh and DisplayPort 1.2 ports of which you can use all four at the same time in a3 surround and then one auxilary configuration and finally they've increased the length of the card slightly to 11 inches to accommodate the much larger heatsink design and the cooler probably deserves its own little overview here asou says using a dual 92 millimeter triple heat pipe Direct see you type cooler that means the heat pipes make direct contact with the GPU core with an open-air design a suits 220 percent as much overall surface area compared to reference so this should give us better card temps compared to a reference cooler at the cost of internal system temps if you're not using a case with solid airflow pulling the cooler off the card by removing the four screws around the core at the back reveals one large ten millimeter diameter heat pipe flanked by a couple of eight millimeter ones and this also gives us a better look at the PCB for the card revealing the final advantage that non-reference cards often have over normal ones uses six phase super alloy power and digital drm design is made to increase the lifespan and efficiency of the card and lower random electrical noise and while it's difficult for us to observe the first two directly especially without a reference 970 to compare against our experience with asus directs you cards lately including this one has been that they are extremely quiet with no observable coil wine which leads us to what I think is the coolest feature of this card and presumably the one that led to the owl logo for it the 970 Strix has a zero decimal idle fan mode so the fan doesn't spin at all with the system powered on and it can actually stay off even in games as long as they aren't very demanding so games like League of Legends are perfect candidates for this of course it'll ramp up like any other card when overclocking or pushing it hard but it speaks volumes about the efficiency of the cooler and the efficiency of the Maxwell based GM 204 GPU that this card is equipped with that it can do this at all so along with geforce experience i shadow play game recording game stream network gaming on shield devices and automatic game optimization driver updates nvidia has added some very interesting new technologies to 900 series cards including third-generation delta color compression to make better use of memory bandwidth dynamic super resolution a way of running less demanding or older games at higher res then down sampling for better visuals mfa a a less demanding anti-aliasing mode with pretty much the same visual quality as MSAA and auto asynchronous warp a vr feature that should improve the experience for users of the oculus rift or similar head-tracking head-mounted displays who are prone to motion sickness you can get more in-depth explanations of these technologies in my gtx 980 video linked here for now the big thing we want to know is how the GTX 970 stacks up against the competition from a price to performance standpoint as well as from an efficiency standpoint take it away loop alright guys just reminder that we're running all of our benchmarks overclocked and that our per graphics card overclocking settings are laid out in the graphics card overclocking dock in the description below this video speaking of which first up we have overclocking do the 970 not being equipped with the auto balancing power rails that bless the 780 Ti and 980 the overclocking of this card is fairly straightforward apply some voltage increase the power level allowance jakab the core in memory clock speeds set a temp target and voila your hopefully running at a range of 1403 to 1459 or above when it finally came to running actual numbers I was happy with how well it performed and essentially every test that slot itself snugly between the 770 and 780 which is good considering it cost pretty much the same as a 770 but just like the GTX 980 before it the 970 isn't exactly earth-shattering in terms of raw performance when compared to the already existing big dogs but what it is is a much better value the price per performance of these cards is much stronger than previous generation of heavy hitters and this is especially true when talking about wattage coming in at a full system wattage of 305 the 970 is an extremely low power overhead card which might actually make a noticeable difference on your power bill depending on what you're running I'm looking at you GTX 480 owners and that's not all this card is running at a temperature of only 71 degrees while under load while overclock not bad at all if you ask me back to you - alright so with that out of the way it looks like the GTX 970 is everything we hoped it would be the 980 is interesting to folks who have 500 plus dollars to spend on a GPU but if you're on a tighter budget or upgrading an older system both the power efficiency even you might not want to upgrade to new power supply and the frankly stunning performance of the 970 Strix make it a compelling choice 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