Attention GTX 970 Owners - Input Needed

Hello OCF'ers!
I'm looking for input from GTX 970 owners as to how pleased or displeased you are with your new cards. If you could provide a link to the GTX 970 you own that would be great. Overall impressions? Any coil whine? Does it overclock well? Driver issues?

Thanks fellas!

LV

I'm pretty impressed with my PNY GTX 970. It uses a reference style cooler that keeps most of the heat outside the case, stays around 57C full load, and it has a very flexible output config with three DisplayPorts. It's also one of the cheaper 970s out there.

What about those of us with a 980 though?!

All GTX970 have coil whine. Usually you can hear it at high FPS. When you enable vsync then you wont hear it.
MSI Gaming, Gigabyte Gaming and Zotac AMP/Extreme seem best right now if you wish to overclock them. EVGA, Palit, Gainward, Inno3D and some others are just like reference cards with 6+6 pin power and some additional limits. ASUS has low coil noise but 1x8 pin power connector so the same as reference cards won't overclock high ( and users are actually complaining about that ).
MSI and ASUS have 0 RPM fan profiles when card is in idle. Most other have ~1k RPM+ but you can play with profiles in soft or bios to fix it if it's too loud for you.

I have Gigabyte G1 and it overclocks good, runs cool, for me is not loud. Coil whine could be lower but it's not so bad. I had other cards much worse.

There is no brand which has better chip selection so no matter if you get cheapest or most expensive card, they can overclock the same. Limiting factors are mainly BIOS, power limits and voltage.
Even if you get low ASIC card then it won't be so much worse for gaming.

Woomack, EVGA also has 0% fan profiles, just so you know.

Forgot about that but I'm not even considering their GTX970 cards worth to buy for any other reason than a good support. Something like Classified would be interesting but I think it's reserved for GTX980+.

On the other hand 0 RPM profiles are overrated. Most these cards are silent in 2D especially when you put them into the case. I have no idea why all are talking about it and say that Gigabyte is bad because it has highest fan speed while idle. Fans on my wc or even HDD work louder than my GB GTX970.

I also forgot to add that MSI, Palit and Gainward have warranty stickers on the cooler so you lose warranty or at least can have some problems if you decide to use water cooling.

When you've got an air cooled case, with all 120mm fans, and only an SSD then 0% really is nice.

You know, like my Hadron.

I usually hear everything around more than my pc. GTX970 is in the benching rig and there are only 120mm fans but all 1.5k RPM+ so I really don't care about fans on the card ... but that's me and I understand that most "regular" users like silence. I have one GTX970 which belongs to my friend and he asked me to change fan profiles in BIOS as he wishes to have silent card in 2D mode. Will check that later, maybe tomorrow.

damn, i can't even hear my 980 at the 1300 rpm stock fan profile speed. Guess some people really do like total silence. I've certainly never minded. I'm wearing headphones if i'm doing anything so it doesn't matter.

Do any 970 boards use a better power circuit than others? Like digital vs analog, 6 or 8 phase vs. 4?

i think asus may be the way to go. the reviews i've seen show the performance difference between an oc'd 970 and a vanilla one at about 13% iirc. say you get a golden card that does 100mhz above average at 1600mhz instead of 1500mhz. that only 20% of the 13% actual performance boost coming from the oc. basically nothing. asus seems to have less issues and is shorter than the gigabyte so it may actually fit in normal cases. just my opinion.

Brando said:

i think asus may be the way to go. the reviews i've seen show the performance difference between an oc'd 970 and a vanilla one at about 13% iirc. say you get a golden card that does 100mhz above average at 1600mhz instead of 1500mhz. that only 20% of the 13% actual performance boost coming from the oc. basically nothing. asus seems to have less issues and is shorter than the gigabyte so it may actually fit in normal cases. just my opinion.

Click to expand...

You could get a golden chip on a reference graphics card of any manufacturer just as easily as on one of the Asus graphics cards.
There are also plenty of brands that are shorter than the Gigabyte and don't have issues.

Best overclocking , best power section, highest power limit = Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac
Quiet work in 2D = ASUS, MSI, EVGA

EVGA, Palit, Gainward, Inno3d, standard version ( reference cooler ) of MSI, Zotac and some others = worse power section and max 225W on default 6+6 pin connectors.
ASUS has good power section but 1x8 power connector so also 225W max.
Gigabyte and MSI have improved power section and 6+8 power connectors = 300W max.
Zotac has improved power section in AMP/Exteme series and highest version has 8+8 power connector but it doesn't change much as these cards won't make much more than ~250-270W after overvoltage.

ASUS and all "reference" cards are clearly limited after overvoltage and clock is almost never constant under load. Usually on these cards max clock is ~50MHz lower.

Not like anyone would see any special difference if GTX970 is overclocked or not but these are the differences between these cards.

Somewhere there can be also Galax but I haven't seen their cards and I think I have no chance on a review sample ( if there is then please contact me ). Thie cards are almost not available in my area and if they do then prices are way too high.

now, I'm biased here because I currently have been using dual Gigabyte 970, but they are awesome, if you can fit them that is.

They come with some of the highest stock clocks available, they feature 8+6 pin power draw, and with a simple BIOS mod, I now have them idling at 1100rpm.. from 4 ft away with the side panel off I dont hear them at all, and I really mean that.. they are silent.

For overclocking Ive so far only pushed with stock bios and got them to boost up to 1550.. will be trying with the nolimits bios once I find the time to ser where they can get to.

IMO they are ome of the top three to get.. as well as Strix and MSI Gaming.

Also, it is not true that all 970 have coil whine even when my fps shoots up to high frames, i do not ever hear a whine from my cards.. only ever a low buzzing, like every othe graphics card Ive ever owned.

These nolimits bioses are kinda joke. People are posting a lot of their magical bioses but in most cases it's not helping in anything, especially on Gigabyte cards. Most of them have no idea how it's working.
To boost at higher clock you need higher value in boost clock table, higher voltage and if you have Gigabyte card then generally nothing else. Gigabyte cards have higher power limit than you actually need while most other brands need higher power limit set in BIOS to make higher clocks. The only thing you may need to change is temperature limit in software but it's somehow linked to card's power limit.

Here is one of the cards that I was testing at stock clocks but max boost table set to 1650MHz , actually boosting at 1645MHz:


It's not fully stable at anything above 1600MHz. It's only passing some benchmarks and this card is 85% ASIC so about the best you can find ( I haven't seen higher so far while some users also had 85% ).

Many users claim they can make 1600+ clock but most of them can't see that card is throttling above 1600MHz ( and usually lower ) and results are like 1520-1550MHz max. ~1550MHz constant clock will be max for 24/7 usage on most GTX970 after mods.