Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming 4GB Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 17.12.15Conclusion
| General | + | ||
| The GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming with 4 Gigabyte of GDDR5 memory is simply amongst the very fastest GTX 970 cards you can buy these days. The new WindForce 3X cooler, which is capable of deactivating the fans, when the card is in idle does a great job and we also liked the RGB lighting, which looks stunning. Apart from that there is a high quality power design, which allows overclocking the GM204 significantly. Looking at performance this is a seriously fast GTX 970 with a maximum boost clock of running at 1417 MHz. Basically there is only one drawback with this card: it is quite expensive. These days a reference GTX 970 costs about 320 Euros. Gigabyte is asking 70 Euro more than that. For that money you do get a lot on top, since this cards is massively overengineered and the cooler in combination with lighting is just great. |
- Cooling
- Design - Noise level - Lighting |
||
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| As noted earlier, the Windforce 3X cooler on this particular card is really powerful. We very much like the fact, that in idle this card is inaudible, since the fans are not spinning at all. Under load the card is still silent and the cooler maintains a maximum temperature of 72°C, which is a actually a rather low temperature target. |
- Inaudible in 2D - Silent in 3D |
||
| Performance | + | - | |
Compared to the reference design, this card features a massive 164 MHz factory overclock regarding the boost clock. Therefore the performance is significantly higher, than what you would be getting from a reference card. On average you can expect this particular card to be about 10 percent faster than the reference GTX 970. Gigabyte even overclocked the memory chips by almost 100 MHz. We also have to mention that this card offers a lot of overclocking potential, since we were able to run 3DMark at a staggering 1592MHz aircooled! |
- Perforamnce - Factory OC - OC Potential (1592 MHz Boost Clock in 3DMark) |
- Power consumption load | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| At the moment we find this card listed in Europe for 392 Euro. At this price point the Gigabyte GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming 4 GB is anything but cheap, but keeping in mind that this is one of the fastest GTX 970 cards available today, which comes with an extremely overengineered PCB, a great looking and powerful cooler with RGB lighting and massive overclocking potential, then you at least know what you're paying the extra for. |
- Silent PC |
||
| The Gigabyte GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming 4 GB receives excellent 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming Review |
Influence of ASIC Quality on Max Boost Clock - EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Reference
 |
|
|