GTX 960 SLI Vs. GTX 970

OrangesBestest

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Jan 24, 2015
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We're not looking at price : performance here.

I have a sale at my hand where an internet store is offering 1 GTX 960 for 180€ + one gratis.

Or should I go for a 970?
 
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The 960 will not last you as long as 970s in SLI. Also, they use more power and more heat than a single 970 for a performance gain that is probably not noticable in most games. You can add a second 970 whereas you will be stuck with two 960s with not that much horsepower. Not that many games actually support SLI anyways. Not to mention the money that will be wasted(heat, electricity, cards, etc.)
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Deleted member 1300495

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The 960 will not last you as long as 970s in SLI. Also, they use more power and more heat than a single 970 for a performance gain that is probably not noticable in most games. You can add a second 970 whereas you will be stuck with two 960s with not that much horsepower. Not that many games actually support SLI anyways. Not to mention the money that will be wasted(heat, electricity, cards, etc.)
 
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Raiin

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Jan 23, 2015
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how much is the 970? personally i dont like Dual graphics, some games dont have Sli/CF profiles till later on and thats a bummer sometimes.
go with the 970, the 960 only has 2gb of ram and thats extremely low for SLi, plus the 970 is way faster than the 960 regardless
 

Smudgy

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as everyone else stated 970 why do you think you'd be getting a 960 for free? all though it isnt a bad deal if you know someone that that price would make an awsome upgrade to their rig???
 

holyrage

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960=ram issues

970=no ram issues * im not talking about the 3.5GB Vram limit here* ( ill go more about it later)

anyways the 970 will run without a VRAM issues while playing at ultra wheres going 960SLI will force u to turn down anything that Pumps the Vram over 2GB usage

anyways about that 970 Vram apparently there is something going on with the card drivers? where it is trying to keep 3.5GB of Vram usage and once it goes above that the bandwidth tanks and u get game stutter

so imo i would wait until thats fixed than grap a GTX970 no questions asked and im pretty sure it would even Run better than 960 SLI
 

Gmailer

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Is there any indication that they have any plans or intention of fixing the 970?
 

jonahman

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in my judgment if you have 2 GTX 960's in SLI it is slightly better than a GTX 970 when you are preforming at a higher resolution than at 1080p. Also a lot of your posts talk about the limited 2 GB's VRAM. However if you look at the EVGA 960 FTW you can get 4 GB's worth of ram however the 128 bit bus is slow it still can out preform a 970 at 1440p gaming, however you will lose to a 970 at or below 1080p gaming.

So my conclusion is if you are planning to game at 1080p than there is no need to over pay and SLI 2 GTX 960's. However if you are playing at 1080p than that doesn't mean that you have to have a GTX 970 either. A GTX 960 one of the EVGA ones that sport a 4 GB buffer is more than enough to handle almost any game at 1080p. However for upgradeability you should really be thinking about get the 970. Remember you can add another one latter and be able to do some gaming at 4K. Just remember if you HAVE to run SLI GTX 960's that you have no upgrade room and that you will be limited to what the card has to offer. With a SLI of GTX 960's you will be paying more than a 970, and will be about only 100 dollars off from a GTX 980. Which is almost as good as a SLI of 970's.

This is my ideas about this card it is up for debate.
 

Nextg_Rival

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Jan 16, 2015
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That's valuable input but you are a bit late to the party mate. The post was made 4 months ago.

PS: In your last sentence I think you meant that a GTX 980 is better than a GTX 960 SLI, because a 980 is not even close to a 970 SLI as far as I know.
 

zombiexeffect

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The Gtx 970 had a specific memory Rop module disabled because of a communication error. just watch Linus talk about it, thats where I learned about it. And @Gmailer They wont fix it, its a engineering error so no matter what they do theres nothing they or anybody will be able to do about it...
 

RchUncleSkeleton

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The ROP module being disabled was not an engineering error, it was a choice made so they could still use chips that may not be fully functional from the 980s to a lower tier card. The error that was made, was the advertised specs, stating that the card originally has 64 ROPs and 2048K of L2 Cache, when it in fact had 56 ROPs and 1792K of L2 Cache. In reality the 970 performs almost identically comparatively to the 980 as far as percentage in performance decrease when using over 3.5GB of VRAM.

You can read all about it here: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Discloses-Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970 and here: http://www.pcgamer.com/why-nvidias-gtx-970-slows-down-using-more-than-35gb-vram/