GeForce GTX 970 4GB Review
Overview
GeForce GTX 970 4GB is a high-end Graphics Card based on the second revision of the Maxwell architecture. Its relatively low release price and mind-blowing performance made it an extremely competitive product. Read below to know more.
Architecture
The Second variant of the Maxwell Architecture, despite being also manufactured with a 28nm technology, has an
extremely large L2 Cache and features a
Third Generation Delta Color Compression which allows NVIDIA to produce Graphics Cards with relatively small memory data transfer rates, without causing too much impact on the overall performance. Furthermore, the Shaders have been redesigned and are both more powerful and energy efficient.
The Second Revision of Maxwell also adds the
VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination) Technology which makes scenes significantly more lifelike and believable as light interacts more realistically in the game environment and the
MFAA Technology which provides the same effect as MSAA but at a much lower performance cost.
GPU
It equips a GPU codenamed GM204-200-A1 which has 13 SM activated and thus offers 1664 Shader Processing Units, 104 TMUs and 64 ROPs, on a 256-bit memory interface of fast GDDR5. The central unit runs at 1050MHz and goes up to 1178MHz, in Turbo Mode, while the memory clock operates at 1753MHz.
Features
DirectX 12.0 Support (11.0 Hardware Default) and support for SLI, MFAA, VXGI, GameStream, G-SYNC, GPU Boost 2.0, GeForce Experience, PhysX and other technologies.
Cooling Solution
The Cooling Solution consists of a Single-Fan and is identical to the one seen on GeForce GTX 770. The Card is known to run cool and has a maximum operating temperature of 95ºC.
Power Consumption
With a rated board TDP of 145W, it requires at least a 500W PSU with two available 6-pin connectors.
Release Price
Pricing is lower than the one seen on its predecessors - $329.99 and makes it an extremely competitive product.
Performance
Gaming benchmarks prove that at 4K (3840x2160) GeForce GTX 970 4GB is over
25% faster than its predecessor and even beats GeForce GTX 780 in about
10%.
System Suggestions
We recommend a very strong processor (Intel Core i7 Quad Core/AMD FX Eight Core) and 12GB of RAM for a system with GeForce GTX 970 4GB.
Source [
Pip]