Palit GTX 970 JetStream 4 GB Review

Name: Palit GTX 970 JetStream 4 GB
Brand: Palit

W1zzard

on Sep 25th, 2014,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Palit

(15 Comments) »

Introduction

The GeForce GTX 970 is the smaller brother to NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 980, of which both are based on the Maxwell architecture using the GM204 graphics processor. The GTX 970, much like its predecessors, the GTX 770 and GTX 670, is destined to be an underrated card decking out lower shelves under the GTX 980's shadow. Steam Hardware survey trends would also agree with our guess that this card will end up selling more between the two in volume, probably even fetching NVIDIA more revenue.

The GeForce GTX 970 is carved out of the 28 nm GM204 silicon on which the GTX 980 is based, by disabling three of sixteen streaming multiprocessors with, each, 128 CUDA cores. The resulting shader count is 1,664. Texture memory units are, proportionately, down to 104, as are clock speeds, although they stay well above the 1 GHz mark. The ROP count stays at a whopping 64, with a 256-bit memory bus width and a standard memory total of 4 GB.

Today, we're reviewing the Palit GeForce GTX 970 JetStream, a non-reference design, factory-overclocked GTX 970 graphics card with a custom-designed PCB. Palit's dual-fan cooler will stop both fans while the card is idle and running light gaming tasks. According to Palit, the card will retail for $345.

GeForce GTX 970 Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	GeForce GTX 970	Palit GTX 970 JetStream	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon HD 7990	GeForce GTX Titan	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 980
Shader Units	1536	2304	2560	1664	1664	2816	2x 2048	2688	2880	2048
ROPs	32	48	64	64	64	64	2x 32	48	48	64
Graphics Processor	GK104	GK110	Hawaii	GM204	GM204	Hawaii	2x Tahiti	GK110	GK110	GM204
Transistors	3500M	7100M	6200M	5200M	5200M	6200M	2x 4310M	7100M	7100M	5200M
Memory Size	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	2x 3072 MB	6144 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	256 bit	256 bit	512 bit	2x 384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1006 MHz+	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1051 MHz+	1152 MHz+	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	837 MHz+	876 MHz+	1126 MHz+
Memory Clock	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz
Price	$340	$420	$370	$330	$345	$460	$1000	$1000	$590	$550

Packaging

Package Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + Documentation
PCIe power cable
DVI adapter
Palit JetStream sticker

The Card

Palit has chosen a bronze color scheme for the top of their cooler, which looks nice without having too much bling. It features two fans which stop in idle and only spin up once the card exceeds 67°C. Dimensions of the card are 25.0 cm x 12.5 cm.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one mini-HDMI port, and three mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card. With three DP outputs, you could run a triple monitor G-Sync surround setup with only a single card!

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.

You may combine up to three GTX 970 cards in a multi-GPU SLI configuration. AMD recently switched to transferring CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus in order to handle 4K frames. NVIDIA's SLI suffers from no such limitations, so there is no reason to use PCIe.