Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 And 980 Review: Maximum Maxwell

[LookItsRain]

That 970 for 350 dollars, holy balls, as Linus would say.

 

[h2323]

Other reviews have the 970 slower than 290 and 290x, but regardless, with that price it's pretty much a beat down. AMD will respond, same story over and over.

 

[pujichao]

plz include 970 & 980 in this quarter's System Builder. Was waiting for Maxwell for a new build

 

[nao1120]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Radeon-R9-390X-Is-AMD-s-Answer-to-NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-980-458742.shtml

 

[nao1120]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Radeon-R9-390X-Is-AMD-s-Answer-to-NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-980-458742.shtml

It always goes back and forth. ALWAYS good for the consumer.

 

[robb99]

I believe that you all have possibly given / listed the wrong information for the EVGA card. You say that the card you tested had the ACX 2.0 cooler but the clocks you show describe another model number . The EVGA 04G-P4-0974-KR does not have the 2.0 cooler or the increase in gpu voltage but has the clocks you list.

 

[vMax]

Been AMD for years and currently on 7970 and was just about to pull the trigger on the R9 290x becouse I seriously did not expect the price to be that good for the GTX 970...I thought Nvidia would charge way more... Just ordered my Gigabyte G1 GTX 970... can't wait as it will be here tomorrow. whoohoo

 

[ohim]

AMD will Bring justice now with devil cards edition... over 666ºc

Stop being an .... check temps between R9-290/x vs GTX780/Ti with custom coolers .. they are about the same .. the only thing that sucked on R9 cards was the reference cooler that is a low grade one.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I think it's important for us all to remember how successful the R9 290 series was. The 290X was such an amazing value that its price hasn't dropped for nearly A YEAR. That is unheard of for a graphics card. Beating a 1-year old card by 10% a year after it came out isn't as a big a deal as most people seem to think it is.

As much as I think the 290 is a great card for the money, "R9" and "successful" from a sales standpoint can't be used in the same sentence. While I thought it was a "great buy", sales of the entire R9 series have been dismal with, until recently, the $700 780 Ti outselling all R9 series combined. I really don't have an explanation for that as I would have thought it would have done much better.

Still today, the sales of individual R9 cards are too small to even be listed individually.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

As of end of August, the entire AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (270, 270x, 280, 280x, 285, 290, 290x) has grabbed 0.60% of the DX11 market while the 780 Ti alone has grabbed 0.53%. That's pretty remarkable at 7 cards to 1 and with those least expensive of those 7 cards going well below the $200 price point whereas the 780 Ti has just dropped below $600.

As for the 290x, I never saw it as appealing....didn't overclock well and was therefore easily surpassed when overclocked by the cheaper 780 at least at resolutions up to 2560. The 280 and 290 are the highlights to my mind of the R9 series and I am at a complete loss as to why they just aren't selling better.... at least to the gaming community. One thing that hurt new card sales for AMD was the original grabbing up of all available stock by bitcoin miners who later put them on the market to be scooped up by gamers thereby hurting new card sales.

As a water cooling enthusiast, my first response to the 390 was "this is big" but after looking at the GPU / VRM temps on these cards, I gotta wonder what the impact will be on EK ? Will people bother to WC a 165 watt card ? I would just to reduce noise but most are in it for the performance gain.

The 390 will be of HUGE importance. IBM owned the laptop market forever it seemed with their flagship A20p winning every Editor's Choice review roundup for years ..... but because of the price, it never really sold a lot of units. People read the reviews, the logo of the "winner" stuck in their minds and when they bought, they bought a "lesser" IBM model and would most times have been better off (for the money) buying something else. When IBM stopped making the A20 flagship model, they stopped winning all those awards and sales tanked.

AMD has to make a strong run and grab the top spot. they haven't been able to make a solid argument here with nVidia winning the title the last 3 generations. It looked like the 290x would do that but nVidia had the 780 Ti sitting in the closet waiting to break it out for just such an occurrence and the 290x OC performance was disappointing. If they can do this with the 390 it would be great but the current pricing of the 9xx series is going to make it very hard to make money doing it, especially with the cost of a built in WC.

 

[g-unit1111]

R u video editing or rendering? If not 8gb won't serve a purpose right now. Couple years from now? Maybe but by then cards will have already come out newer than the 980

What? 8GB is pretty much the sweet spot right now. Anything more is overkill, anything less won't get you very far.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Will there be a follow-up article about overclocking these cards? Other sites are showing results that both of the new cards are capable of 1500+ MHz on air (aftermarket coolers and even a few with stock coolers), which is a massive overclock. Looks like NVIDIA left the door open for some decent voltage increases, but many results have been in the 1450-1500 MHz range at stock voltage. I am a big fan of the thoroughness of Tom's articles so I am very interested in seeing overclocking results and analysis from this site.

This is what I found so far .... not had much time today

Guru 3D / Reference / Sample / Overclocked / % OC
Core Clock: 1126 / 1126 / 1326 / 117.8%
Boost Clock: 1216 / 1216 / 1452 / 119.4%
Memory Clock: 7000 / 7000 / 8002 / 114.3%
Performance Gain: BF4- 114.6 %


TechPowerUp / Reference / Sample / Overclocked / % OC
Core Clock: 1126 / 1126 / 1350 / 119.9%
Boost Clock: 1216 / 1216 / Not Listed / NA
Memory Clock: 7000 / 7000 / 8002 / 114.3%
Performance Gain: Firestrike / 115.5 %

On other sites you can see a fully overclocked 970 on stock cooling can just beat out a stock 980, which makes it crazy good value (something not really addressed in this article). With a water loop or AIO Liquid cooler bracketed onto the 970, it looks like you might be able to push it even further as others were hitting thermal limits at maximum overclock, not voltage or stability limits. This card looks to be one crazy good value board if you are overclocking.

Same thing with 780 and 780 Ti .... 670 and 680 .... 570 and 580

Not quite as good as using two 560 Ti's in SLI for $400 that was a whopping 40% faster and $100 cheaper than a single 580 at $500

People need to understand something about Maxwell's supposed "boring incremental" performance over Kepler.

What's boring ? ...... The 980 is 23% faster than the 780 ... which is much bigger than the lead of the 780 over the 680 or the 680 over the 580.

 

[Onus]

R u video editing or rendering? If not 8gb won't serve a purpose right now. Couple years from now? Maybe but by then cards will have already come out newer than the 980

What? 8GB is pretty much the sweet spot right now. Anything more is overkill, anything less won't get you very far.

I think he's talking about the amount of RAM on the graphics card, not the amount in the system.

 

[west7]

The gtx 970 is the first nvidia card that make me wanna buy it from a long time amazing performance for 330$ card

 

[west7]

The gtx 970 is the first nvidia card that make me wanna buy it from a long time amazing performance for 330$ card

 

[g-unit1111]

u guys this thing ( gtx 970 ) could run on my CX430 of 32 amps?

No you want to upgrade that thing ASAP, Corsair CX430 won't handle anything beyond a basic GPU like a GT630 or Radeon 5450, anything decent you want at least a 600W, 750W would be best.

 

[FormatC]

Overclocking... Nice question but too less time.

- The Reference GTX 980 in my hands goes up to 1350 MHz base clock, not more.
- The Gigabyte GTX 980 Golden sample goes up to 1500 MHz, but I'm sure that this is not realistic for the masses-.
- The Sweet Spot for this cards is lower than reference clocks

Currently the chip quality is so different that it makes no sense to say, how good (or not) a card can be overclocked generally.

 

[Sir3x6]

Disappointing with just 4GB of VRAM. Modded skyrim using 4.5GB @1080p, this make the titan still the faster card for 4K.

 

[smeezekitty]

Pretty much blew every other card out of the water. And NVidia did well in pricing it too.

 

[Lascar]

u guys this thing ( gtx 970 ) could run on my CX430 of 32 amps?

That depends on what CPU you have. If you have 90w rated CPU then yes because the card has a max peak of around 230 thats under extreme conditions thought. It should take only about 160-180w under normal gaming load. But honestly thats cutting it short because if i you got hit by a slightly efficiency deficient PSU u might end up burning something.

 

[Buffalufacus]

So would it be worth me upgrading to the 970 if I have 2 R9 280xs in Crossfire right now? Would it be worth the performance boost?

 

[Lascar]

So would it be worth me upgrading to the 970 if I have 2 R9 280xs in Crossfire right now? Would it be worth the performance boost?

Actually you would be killing yourself and wasting money, R9 280x in CF vs single 970? no question there.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

u guys this thing ( gtx 970 ) could run on my CX430 of 32 amps?

That depends on what CPU you have. If you have 90w rated CPU then yes because the card has a max peak of around 230 thats under extreme conditions thought. It should take only about 160-180w under normal gaming load. But honestly thats cutting it short because if i you got hit by a slightly efficiency deficient PSU u might end up burning something.

1. It's a CX so have to be on alert already.

2. http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications

Thermal and Power Specs:
98 C = Maximum GPU Tempurature (in C)
145 W = Graphics Card Power (W)
500 W = Minimum System Power Requirement (W)
2x 6-pins = Supplementary Power Connectors

 

[howiejcee]

"they have got it where it counts: higher frame rates for significantly less cash than we're used to paying"

I'm definitely not complaining about the price however, people should know that $549 MSRP is not really "earth-shattering".

The 480, 580, and 680 were all $500. Only with the 780 did they hike it to $650.

So this price is much more reasonable.

 

[smeezekitty]

Disappointing with just 4GB of VRAM. Modded skyrim using 4.5GB @1080p, this make the titan still the faster card for 4K.

Most cards are shipping with between 1 and 4 GB. Using (and providing) more than 4 GB of VRAM is still
the exception more than the norm. Not to say that it will stay that way for long, but for this generation
adding more VRAM would just be unnecessary cost.

 

[JaMGeR20]

u guys this thing ( gtx 970 ) could run on my CX430 of 32 amps?

That depends on what CPU you have. If you have 90w rated CPU then yes because the card has a max peak of around 230 thats under extreme conditions thought. It should take only about 160-180w under normal gaming load. But honestly thats cutting it short because if i you got hit by a slightly efficiency deficient PSU u might end up burning something.

1. It's a CX so have to be on alert already.

2. http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications

Thermal and Power Specs:
98 C = Maximum GPU Tempurature (in C)
145 W = Graphics Card Power (W)
500 W = Minimum System Power Requirement (W)
2x 6-pins = Supplementary Power Connectors

It has been running flawlessly ( not sure if i wrote that right LOL ) for some time with my i7-3770 non K an my hd 7850. but i know i gotta change it some time soon lol.