The Test

Quickly touching on the subject of compatibility, as readers of last week’s GTX 980 review may recall, we had initial compatibility issues with our GTX 970 FTW that prevented us from including it in our review. Since then NVIDIA has been able to isolate the issue and has put together the 334.16 drivers, which include a fix for the problem we were seeing. So we are now up and running. NVIDIA tells us that the issue only impacted certain motherboards (such as our ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional), and as far as we can tell that appears to be correct, as we have not seen any other reports of compatibility issues.

Moving on, for the purposes of our testing we will be looking at both the GTX 970 FTW in its shipping configuration and in a reference clocked configuration. EVGA has given us the reference GTX 970 vBIOS to flash to this card (taking advantage of the triple BIOS feature), allowing us to turn it into a standard GTX 970 for that part of our testing.

CPU: Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200i
Hard Disk: Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB)
Memory: G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26)
Case: NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition
Monitor: Asus PQ321
Video Cards: AMD Radeon R9 290X
AMD Radeon R9 290
AMD Radeon R9 280X
AMD Radeon HD 7970
AMD Radeon HD 6970
EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW ACX 2.0
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
Video Drivers: NVIDIA Release 344.07 Beta
NVIDIA Release 344.16 Beta
AMD Catalyst 14.300.1005 Beta
OS: Windows 8.1U1 Pro

 

Meet The EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW ACX 2.0 Metro: Last Light
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  • Kalessian - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    Is it really safe to overclock the memory like that when there aren't any heatsinks on them?

    Also, 1st?
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    As long as you're not giving them additional voltage (which you can't do on this card): yes. GDDR5 does not consume all that much power, even if it is relatively more than DDR3. The airflow off of the fans is plenty for stock voltage.
  • Viewgamer - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    Why no Mantle benchmarks for Thief ?
  • winterspan - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    I'm assuming because this is an Nvidia review...
  • eanazag - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    No mantle is likely because it didn't give a great showing last time in the AMD mantle review. If I remember correctly, Thief maybe even had a performance regression with Mantle being used.
  • Ammaross - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    Because Mantle only has benefit in CPU-capped performance. When you run benchmarks on an i7 or better, Mantle has no tangible benefit and sometimes has regressions.
  • Viewgamer - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    Or even Mantle benchmarks for BF4 for that matter ?
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link

    Apologies. The Mantle results have to be added manually since our graphing system can't handle multiple results for the same card automatically. I had actually entered in the data but neglected to regenerate the graphs.
  • SeanJ76 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link

    Sounds like your not using EVGA PrecisonX 4.2.1, you can add as much voltage as you like to the 970 GTX FTW.........idiot.....
  • P39Airacobra - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link

    Ok first of all EVGA Precision or the type of software has nothing to do with that, Also he has a valid concern about the V-Ram temps and the VRM. Also don't call people idiots! That's my Job! IDIOT!

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