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ASUS Strix GTX 970 OC 4 GB Review
Packaging & Contents »Introduction
The GeForce GTX 970 is the other big graphics card launch of the day, apart from the high-end GeForce GTX 980. If you haven't given our GTX 980 launch review a quick browse through, check it out first as it goes into many more technical details and discusses NVIDIA's new software features. 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.
Priced at $329, displacing the GeForce GTX 770 (which is now discontinued), the GTX 970 is a higher-grade performance-segment graphics card not too far away from the crucial $250 price-point, which earns NVIDIA and AMD a sizable bulk of their discrete GPU revenues. The card is designed to run anything you throw at it at resolutions as high as 2560x1600 pixels and, perhaps, even Ultra HD, with watered down details. That alone makes the GTX 970 very exciting because today's $250 offerings, the Radeon R9 285 from AMD and NVIDIA's own GTX 760 (it saw a price-cut down to $220 at the time of writing), will run anything at 1080p, but may falter with higher resolutions. So your choice boils down to whether spending an additional $80 as a feature-proofing measure is worth it to you.
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 ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970 OC, a non-reference design, factory-overclocked GTX 970 graphics card with a custom-designed PCB and the company's new STRIX cooling solution, which stops the fans in idle for a completely noiseless experience. According to ASUS, the card will retail for $349.
| GeForce GTX 680 | GeForce GTX 780 | Radeon R9 290 | GeForce GTX 970 | ASUS GTX 970 STRIX | 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+ | 1114 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 | $350 | $460 | $1000 | $1000 | $590 | $550 |