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 to probably even fetch NVIDIA more revenue overall.

The GeForce GTX 970 is carved out of the same 28 nm GM204 silicon the GTX 980 is based on, by disabling three of sixteen streaming multiprocessors with 128 CUDA cores each. 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.



While Colorful might not be a well-known name to many gamers in the West, they are a big player in the Asia-Pacific markets, with their strongest foothold in China where they sell a ton of cards to DIY system builders.

Their iGame GTX 970 is a highly overclocked version of the GTX 970 with a large triple-fan cooler that should provide excellent temperatures.

I couldn't find a USD price for the card, so I assumed its price point to be $350, which is in line with other custom GTX 970 offerings.