Why does my GTX 970 underperform?

[Spearsmen620]

So I built my CPU in January last month, and decided to go all out with a GTX 970 from Zotac as I heard good things from them. I bought the stock one they had since I heard that you can easily overclock your cards. I've been getting pretty good frames in games on 1080, but I've noticed that in games where other people with 970s would get 80+, I would only get 60+. So I decided to use 3DMark and use the Firestrike benchmark.

ANYWAYS, I got a REALLY low score in my opinion compared to other GTX 970s. My score is here http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4040731 and I know the physics test bottlenecks my score, but I noticed that other people's graphics score was at least 10,000, mostly ranging from 11-12k, but my score was only 9533. This was my highest score as well!

My rig is:
i5 4440
h97 ASrock mini itx wifi
ZOTAC GTX 970 (Overclocked: http://puu.sh/fLlIR/a7070f49f0.png )
RVZ01 Case
120 SSD
1tb HDD
8gb TEAM ELITE (1 stick 1600 MHz)

I am using the latest drivers as you can see. Latest updates on Windows 8.1 64 bit.

If you need any more information, I can provide it.

 

[HomerThompson]

How did the card perform in your friend's system? I'm really interested to see what the problem is here.

 

[Spearsmen620]

How did the card perform in your friend's system? I'm really interested to see what the problem is here.

I haven't had the chance to test it out yet since my friend and I are both college students, we haven't have the time to set and do the benchmarks.

 

[Mr_Monkey]

Did you ever figure this out? I'm running into a very similar issue with my gtx 970

 

[Ggabi]

Im getting these results: Do i have a malfunctioning card as well? My physics score is so low.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7644463?

Graphics Score 11518
Physics Score 6406
Combined Score 4293

CPU i5-4460
GPU Zotac 970x 9010105-10P
Mem 2x 4gb corsair vengeance
Asus h97m-e

retesting got me:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7644287? but still quite poor?

 

[Arronleeds]

physics is your cpu not gpu, your gpu score is actually better than mine at stock. my 970 pulls 10900 at stock and 13600 ocd. your cpu may need rmaing.

 

[HomerThompson]

Im getting these results: Do i have a malfunctioning card as well? My physics score is so low.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7644463?

Graphics Score 11518
Physics Score 6406
Combined Score 4293

CPU i5-4460
GPU Zotac 970x 9010105-10P
Mem 2x 4gb corsair vengeance
Asus h97m-e

retesting got me:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7644287? but still quite poor?

Your graphics score is right in line with where a stock 970 should be, and your physics score is right where a lower clocked i5 should be. The physics score isn't really representative of the kind of CPU you need for gaming. What you have right now is about the best price to performance gaming CPU out there, anything more expensive has some major diminishing returns. The Firestrike physics score loves more cores and loves hyperthreading from an i7 or Xeon E3, but it's not really representative of gaming loads right now.

 

[Ggabi]

Im getting these results: Do i have a malfunctioning card as well? My physics score is so low.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7644463?

Graphics Score 11518
Physics Score 6406
Combined Score 4293

CPU i5-4460
GPU Zotac 970x 9010105-10P
Mem 2x 4gb corsair vengeance
Asus h97m-e

retesting got me:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7644287? but still quite poor?

Your graphics score is right in line with where a stock 970 should be, and your physics score is right where a lower clocked i5 should be. The physics score isn't really representative of the kind of CPU you need for gaming. What you have right now is about the best price to performance gaming CPU out there, anything more expensive has some major diminishing returns. The Firestrike physics score loves more cores and loves hyperthreading from an i7 or Xeon E3, but it's not really representative of gaming loads right now.

So in contrary to Aaronleeds, i shouldnt RMA this?

But i see other peoples i5 score much better than mine?

for example:

i5-3570K gets physics 8208
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/250770

i5-2500 gets physics :7970

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4090282

 

[RobCrezz]

I suspect that the 2500k and 3570k in them tests were overclocked (which would make them faster than the 4440 - i dont trust the 3dmark reported clock speed.

 

[Ggabi]

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7645735

This is by far the best score ive gotten...

 

[HomerThompson]

So in contrary to Aaronleeds, i shouldnt RMA this?

But i see other peoples i5 score much better than mine?

for example:

i5-3570K gets physics 8208
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/250770

i5-2500 gets physics :7970

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/4090282

That i5-3570k has a 37.5% higher clockspeed than your i5-4460, and a 28% higher physics score, which is right in line with what to expect since that's an Ivy Bridge chip and has lower instructions per clock cycle (IPC) than your Haswell chip, so the gain is only 28% even though the clock speed is 37.5% faster.

 

[Ggabi]

great! so in short i have an ok cpu right?

 

[HomerThompson]

great! so in short i have an ok cpu right?

Yeah, your numbers are great.