ASUS GeForce GTX 970 STRIX OC Edition Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 19.09.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The ASUS GTX 970 STRIX is an overall really
interesting card and the news, scaled down version of NVIDIA's GM204
Maxwell chip is surprisingly quick. Thanks to a decent factory
overclock and a the great STRIX custom cooler this is not just a fast
but also a silent graphics card.
The manufacturing quality is very good too and the backplate is definitely
a must when you are looking at a premium graphics card. Apart from that,
the GTX 970 appears to really like overclocking, meaning we were really
surprise to able to push this card all the way up to 1'450 MHz! Keeping
in mind that the reference boost clock is set to 1'178 MHz this means
there is still a lot of headroom and overclocking these cards, even
aircooled is a lot of fun and you can squeeze a really decent boost of
your card. The only thing we would like to see improved with this particular card is the bundle. We'd love to find a few additional goodies, since after all this is a premium card. |
- Performance - Intelligent fan control - Cooling |
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| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| The GPU temperatures were very good at a maximum of 69°C under heavy FurMark load with the fans locked at 30% fan speed. From a noise level perspective, the new STRIX series from ASUS provides 0dB while in idle or under very low-loads, which means the fans are completely off and they're designed to start spinning when GPU reaches 65 degress. Furthermore, the cooler is really powerful and it keeps the card at reasonable temperatures even under heavy load. When running Furmark for 15 minutes the GPU temperature never passed 69 degrees, which is way lower then what you get with the NVIDIA's reference cooler. | - Noise level in both idle and load - 0dB in idle | ||
| Performance | + | - | |
| A closer look at overall performance shows that the
GTX 970 STRIX OC Edition is, on average almost 32 percent faster than a
reference GTX 770. The new Maxwell based graphics cards are definitely
an upgrade over the old architecture.
Taking a look at the clock speed shows that this card clocks at 1'265
MHz on average, when applying heavy 3D loads. At this point one can
really see GPU Boost 2.0 doing its job, since it always tries to get
the maximum clock speeds out of the card, without overstepping the
temperature target. A closer look at power consumption shows, that our test system, equipped with the GTX 970 STRIX OC Edition, burns 63 Watts under idle conditions and 252 Watts under load. We would have expected the idle power consumption to be closer to the results gathered with the GTX 750 Ti. Load power consumption is really good with this card, especially if you consider the performance level this card reaches. |
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Performance/Watt - Power consumption under load |
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| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| The ASUS GTX 970 STRIX is a seriously quick graphics card, which comes bundled with a great cooler and on top of all that the GTX 970 offers excellent energy efficiency. At the moment the MSRP of the GTX 970 is 299 US-Dollar, which makes the GTX 970 hit the sweet spot. We have to say for this price, the GTX 970 is a very juicy offer. | -
Gaming - Enthusiast |
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| The GTX 970 STRIX from ASUS receives 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti STRIX OC Edition Review |
ASUS GeForce GTX 980 STRIX Review
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