Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming 4GB Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 17.12.15Page:
The card
Gigabyte equipped their new GeForce GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming with the latest version of their own cooler, which is called WindForce 3X 600W. It features five 6mm copper heatpipes, which have all been routed through a copper base plate. The copper base established contact to the GPU as well as the memory. Soldered to the heatpipes, there is a large and dense fin stack which is being cooled by three 80mm fans. The fans only spin when the chip surpasses a certain temperature, thus cooling the card passively when it's in idle. In order to keep the VRM area cool, there is an additional metal plate, which is in contact with the heatpipes, to also provide active cooling to this part of the graphics card.
The Gigabyte GTX 970 Xtreme Gaming graphics card, or to be precise our sample of
it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'592 MHz
for the GPU and 1'798 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D
benchmark with 15 minutes duration. With these clocks we had to feed the GPU
with 1.256 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages.
A closer look at the PCB shows that Gigabyte equipped this card with a 10+2+2 phase digital power design. The GPU gets its current from ten phases, two phases take good care of the 4GB of GDDR5 memory and two additional phase are in charge of PLL. Once more, Gigabyte is using high quality chokes. Checking the voltage regulation chip, we find a digital multi-phase buck controller uP1984A.
The memory chips used are made by Elpida and carry the model number W4032BABG-70-F. They are specified to run at 1'750 MHz (7'000 MHz effective).
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