Gadgetory

do you even lift bro the GD x9 series has recently been released with the 970 being priced at 330 USD and the 980 coming in at 550 USD I opted to go with the 970 as I clearly see it as the best value for money out of the two and this model here is the gigabyte g1 gaming Edition so today we'll look at some features of the graphics card itself then we'll look at some benchmarks temps noise and power consumption and then I'll move on to a conclusion so the GTX 970 g1 from gigabyte is not your typical reference card this model in particular features the most aggressive out-of-the-box overclocks for a graphics card that i've ever seen in my life coming in with a burst clock that goes all the way up to thirteen hundred and seventy-six megahertz they also this model in particular features the updated tray wind force cooler from gigabyte which in the noise test you'll see actually sounds really quiet so gigabyte have decided to update the styling of their graphics cards this model in particular features a black machined steel finish all across the card which I must say looks very sexy on the rear of the card we've got g1 gaming here with some aggressive style vent holes on the rear it shares that same aggressive look with vent holes and that's still coming over the uncovering the heat shroud pipes also on the front of the card we have here the triforce cooler which is actually very quiet in operation and the best thing is they've gone away with the plastic fan shroud and they've put this machined steel black finish on the fan shroud as well so it makes the card feel very solid and the cut does indeed feel very solid weighing in at 805 grams on the left side of the card we have wind force which illuminates to a bright blue so it actually looks pretty cool in the dark and on the left side here we have that same aggressive styling with the vent holes there and the machined steel black finish encompassing the whole grapes card now moving on to the rear of the graphics card we have here a DVI I dual link a DVID dual link and three display ports and a HDMI 2.0 so that's right this will support from the HDMI 60 Hertz at 4k resolution which is an update on the GTX 9 series in particular also we can't forget here that in gigabyte have gone away with the reference 6+6 pin design and they've gone with an 8 pin +6 been designed to help support higher overclocks also this model in particular allows you to go up to 3-way SLI which is giving you guys upgrade ability in the future so the GTX 9 series you also get some new technologies from Nvidia with support for DirectX 12 you also get the support for the new MFA a technology which is supposed to give you the performance of for speed MSAA with the performance hit of only 2 speed msaa so another technology introduced with this graphics card is resolution downscaling which will essentially do just that it'll take a higher quality image down scale it to whatever resolution you're playing at which is supposed to give you a better picture now I'll be testing all these technologies in the next coming weeks and let you know my personal opinion on them but also another technologies don't have to forget is VR the oculus rift they're supposedly meant to reduce the latency involved with that however I don't personally use the oculus rift and I don't see myself using it in the near future so let's get on with the benchmark so this is the part you've all been waiting for at the benchmarks and essentially I put my system specs in the description below for you guys and it's important to note that I am going to start testing out-of-the-box settings as opposed to overclocked settings because as people say this makes sense because this is what you are guaranteed when you buy this graphics card I also doing a separate section for the overclock so you can see that a little bit later but let's move on now to the benchmarks the first one here is battlefield 4 1080p ultra on the test range we have here the GTX 970 out of the box settings scored 156 point two for average frames per second and the GTX 780 scored 138 point one - this is the Lightning Edition which also comes with a standard factory overclock moving on to Crysis 3 this is where the GTX 780 actually scores a victory here coming at a fifty eight point nine six average FPS versus fifty six point eight for moving on now to Skyrim this is essentially a result that doesn't change due to it being CPU bound at 1080p you can see here the results are pretty much identical now moving on to ARMA 3 1080p ultra the results here are pretty much very similar with the GTX 970 slightly edging out the GTX 780 but it's nothing to be concerned about moving on to fire strike and popular new-school popular benchmark and the GTX 970 pretty much destroyed the net 780 in this or in this actual benchmark all surprised at how high this actual graphics card scored and wait till you see the overclocked score as well that's not even more impressive so moving on now did you know gene valley extreme HD preset I basically put all the cards that I've tested recently here so you can have an idea of how they perform especially at 1080p as you can see here the GTX 780 actually beats the 970 in this benchmark it actually beats it by quite a bit so I was pretty surprised here that the GTX 970 didn't do as well as the GTX 780 however it still does a lot better than 760 and also the 750 Ti and the alanine 270 let's move on now to power noise and temperature so let's move on now some power consumption figures for you guys this was done I measured this with my kilowatt meter and this was done with an antic Earth Watts 650 watt bronze power supply now as we can see here this was done in UniGene valley extreme HD preset you see here the GTX 970 uses up like 120 watts on average less than the 780 does which was really impressive in my opinion I mean this is this is actually a considerable amount of power and if you live in a country like I do in Japan where you're paying a lot for power this can actually add up over time so if you're a hardcore gamer who plays a lot of games like literally eight hours a day or whatnot then you may wish to consider getting a maxwell GPU just for that purpose alone however looking at the idols there was really no difference between them I mean maybe we're 1.5 watt or something like that it was really not much at all let's move on now to the noise I want to talk about the noise of both these cards the 780 lightning that I had come through very quiet extremely quiet that was a try froze all the wind force as well yeah I've got it in the background now it is just extremely quiet it's such a quiet graphics card and actually I'm really close to my rig at the moment closer than I've ever been before in the past so the wind force and the Tri froze are they're both amazing coolers the wind force does an extremely good job of cooling the card though this is one of the lowest temp air coolers I've ever seen in my life I mean I'm going to show you when I overclock to this graphics card this is a 24 degrees ambient temperatures when I overclocked the GTX 970 windforce Edition it only got up to 64 degrees Celsius so I mean this has so much more Headroom so in the heat of summer I can still keep my overclocks without having to worry about my graphics card overheating so the wind force cooler kudos to the updated wind force cooler it is one amazing cooler that just let makes literally no noise and it also keeps the grabs card very cool as well Wow so let's move on to some overclocked numbers now how did this card overclocked well it overclocked extreme well I was blown away this is a retail sample as well I haven't been gifted a golden sample from Nvidia or from any vendor this was just me going to the store picking up a retail sample and my god this thing overclocked insanely high it was it went up to I think my core clock in MSI Afterburner measured up to like fifteen hundred and fifty megahertz and that was stable as well so I was absolutely impressed with the overclock I decided to throw in some 1440p benchmarks for you guys here so here it is Crysis 3 ultra at 1440p as we can see here the GTX 970 actually loses at the out of the box settings however when we overclocked the 970 it actually beat the GTX 780 in Crysis 3 at 1440p so we're starting to see a relation here and that is that generally that the gtx 970 or the maxwell series as you go up in resolutions they actually scale a lot better than the kepler's did so you'll see this with the GTX I start with the battlefield 4 tests here as well we have 1440p ultra on the test range and again it just it mean it took the ball and ran away from the GTX 780 the GTX 780 overclocked couldn't even or just about the same speeds as the GTX 970 one was out of the box so Wow impressive overclocking figures there I'm just going to pull up the fire strike benchmark a screenshot of it for you this was the 970 overclocked it pulled over 13,000 points on the GPU score absolutely phenomenal I couldn't believe that I mean people were showing me their 980 benchmark scores in fire strike and I'm seeing my 970 do more than the GTX 980 for a card that literally in Japan costs $300 less so in conclusion we'll move on to the conclusion now and this card is going to get some big bananas so in conclusion I can't help but be nothing but impressed with this graphics card I mean it overclocked like the clappers it was virtually noise free the power consumption was a lot less than the previous 7 Series card and also the updated styling just was I love this stalling it's sexy and it looks really good so kudos to gigabyte for getting it right with the wind force this time around however that being said let's look at something that concerns me and that is the pricing currently in America this card's recommended that around about 329 retail with his model in particular being around 369 USD in Japan I paid about 470 USD and that's what bothers me I think the recommended retail pricing from Nvidia isn't flowing through to the rest of the world Australia the UK for example where we're getting fleeced by the retails so I wished in video would address that pretty soon as I want to get the best value for money however that being said if you live in America and you can get this for recommended retail pricing then it is one insanely good buy I mean the performance for the money is really good you're also going to have cards that run cool and use less power so there's just this card in general is just such a win at 330 or 300 $69 but if you get two of them you'll just have insane performance for the money also I think that the GTX 970 else absolutely surprised that it's two hundred and twenty dollars cheaper than the 980 and it's only like 20% slower so that's just insanely good value for money this reminds me of the 670 versus 680 all over again with this this time around being that the six of the 970 is the card to get even more so than it was in the sixth series so that being said if you like this review please give it a thumbs up if you have any questions about this graph is gone please leave a comment in the comment section below and if you haven't subscribed already hit that sub button subscribe to tech s city because I'm going to have more videos coming about the Maxwell architecture and some of the technologies of this card features in the very near future so stay tuned for that and peace out for now bye