GTX 970: Trying to understand benchmark results...

[faridc]

Hi,

I started tinkering with GPU overclocking a few days ago. Yesterday, I ran a few benchmarks and it looked like my 970 performed better at stock settings.
The differences seem to me quite negligible, at this rate is it worth OC'ing?
I know the offsets I've used are lower than most people have been using and many have been using higher numbers for both GPU core and Memory clocks and combining them as well.

On a side note, I was hoping the prices for the GTX 970 would be "dramatically" lower by now since the 1070's and 1080's are grabbing higher market shares. I purchased my 970 about a year and a half ago for $309 on newegg.com, now it is $499 on amazon.com!
Had they come below $300, I would have added a second one and SLI them.

My rig:
Windows 10 (home 64 bit)
i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz
RAM: 16 GB (Adata MI64C1D1629Z1 2x8GB)
MoBo: ASUS P8Z77-M Pro
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SSC Gaming ACX 2.0+ (04G-P4-3975-KR)
PSU: Corsair CX750M
SSD 1: Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB
SSD 2: Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB
Case: Fractal Design ARC Mini R2

 

[CorsairSSC]

Your GTX 970 is called "SSC", or "supersuperclocked", for a reason. EVGA makes sure the card is tweaked as far as it can go, and trying to push it even further may result in problems with heat dissipation and power delivery.

GTX 970 prices are going higher than normal because NVIDIA and its board partners are not producing anymore of them. You should wait for the generation after Pascal (11-series cards) and update to a 1170 1 or 2 years down the road instead of buying another GTX 970, as there are problems with SLI support in newer titles.

Or, you know, you could always buy an AMD GPU (Vega RX 490).

 

[VincentP]

Cards throttle based on power and temperature. Overclocking won't always improve things.
If you go down down the path of SLI, just remember that not all games scale well. You will rarely get near double the performance.
Also, each card uses its own VRAM independently so in SLI you still have 3.5 GB of effective high performance VRAM. This is fine for most things but if the goal is to turn up settings then you may find this becomes a problem.
I would rather have a GTX 1070 than 2 x GTX 970 cards in SLI. The performance will be much more consistent, minimum frame rates will be higher and effective VRAM is 8 GB.