PNY GTX 970 (w/ reference blower cooler) Review

[PatrikStar24]

After 1 month on back order (and another 1-2 weeks for it to actually ship to my house afterwards...ugh...), the upgrade to my old reference Radeon HD 6870 has arrived. I will try to put this review together as best as I can.

 

Let's start with temps, it cools quite well for a blower cooler, with the only side effect being that it heats up my room faster as a result. Idling at Windows desktop and when web browsing, I get 34-36℃(down from 40-46 w/ old card) with an ambient temperature of 80°F (I know it's November, but I live in a Desert, we don't expect cold weather until later in the month, if that). After 2 matches in Warthunder, it didn't get higher than 62℃(down from 70). Renegade X never got higher than 53℃ (down from a whopping 70-75). After 5-10 minutes in MechWarrior Online, highest it got was 68℃(down from 75-80. See where I'm going with this?). TL;DR It's a cool running card.

 

On to quality. Surprisingly enough, my unit doesn't have coil whine like other people have. Luck? The cooler housing felt a little on the cheap side, but not so cheap that it breaks with the littlest bit of force. At idle, no noise comes from the fan, under load though, there is a quiet but uncomfortable grind-like noise starting at 50% fan speed. I confirmed this by using MSI Afterburner to manually run at 50-60% fan speed. Again, not too loud of a noise, but it is a bit uncomfortable. Maybe it'll work itself out down the line.

 

Next is game performance. Before I start, I just want to say that going from 1 GB VRAM to 4 GB has really made a difference (especially w/ MWO and Crysis 2, both using ~2 GB VRAM). WarThunder: constant 60 FPS @ maximum settings (motion blur and SSAO are off, with bad screen tearing problems specific to Vsync within this particular game, all other games are fine). MWO: constant 60, no drops @ maximum settings (AA is off, but has the option for TXAA). Crysis 2: 60 FPS w/ DX 11 patch and High res texture pack installed, maximum settings, maybe the occasional drop into the 50s (up from 20-25 w/ occasional jump to 30-40 on old card... God help me...).
TL;DR 60 FPS across the board with 1 or 2 exceptions

 

Final Rating: 9/10

Although I could have waited for the MSI blower (4GD5), that would have taken even longer to eventually show up at my front door, and I am a VERY impatient man. Excellent for people in low or nonexistent airflow situations, it saved me from building a whole new rig from scratch (although I might do that post-Cannonlake if thing go well for me anyway).

Available at these place AFAIK:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NH5ZNWA/?tag=pcpapi-20
Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133564&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=
I think it's also available on NCIX, but I'm too lazy to look for it.

Edit: I'm using a custom fan profile via MSI Afterburner https://imgur.com/ZJNTmM9

[E982]

Thank you.

[-ism]

What % does the fan get to in-game?

[PatrikStar24]

What % does the fan get to in-game?

Using my particular custom fan profile, about 55%. Have since clarified in OP.

https://imgur.com/ZJNTmM9

[ImBleu]

Not exactly reference blower. Heck if I had found a GTX970 with the 980/Titan blower i'd of bought them all.

[Guest]

Nice review

Man if you think a reference 970 heats up your room, wait till you have a reference 290 or 290x in your rig, I actually didn't need to turn on my oil heater to keep my room warm in winter lol

In saying that, Auckland winters don't even have snow so its not very cold!

[CameronDSetty]

My friend bought this, even after I urged him not to buy blower and PNY and wait till all the other versions got back in stock. To my surprise it has worked great, and the heat really isnt bad at all. Really good job PNY, the plastic cover looks cool and its usually the cheapest one.

[ROK]

I personally would have got the EVGA blower one.

[Norman_the_Owl]

Nice review

Man if you think a reference 970 heats up your room, wait till you have a reference 290 or 290x in your rig, I actually didn't need to turn on my oil heater to keep my room warm in winter lol

In saying that, Auckland winters don't even have snow so its not very cold!

Now that it's winter, i actually use furmark to get my room warmer while the heater kicks on

[Mao_Zedong]

pny ftw! if you can't tell, my profile pic is a pny gtx 660, the gpu i have.

[Stomplar]

i owned a pny card before. i dont even remember what it was. lol it was a 128mb card waaay back. haaha

[ChipWoodChainSaw]

Thanks for the review, never knew if the blower style coolers were good or not but now i see they are.

[Tim Drake]

As much as I love War Thunder, it is a pretty bad game to benchmark for temps or performance. My friend can run it at 60fps on Intel HD 4000 so it's extremely easy to run and won't even use near all of the GPU. Try games like Metro Last Light, Battlefield 4 etc. But otherwise, great review thanks!

[Tim Drake]

Thanks for the review, never knew if the blower style coolers were good or not but now i see they are.

 

It's all depending on the GPU you go for. Reference blowers are pretty bad with high end AMD because they run hotter but because of the new  nVidia Architecture, it runs pretty cool. 

[That Norwegian Guy]

As much as I love War Thunder, it is a pretty bad game to benchmark for temps or performance. My friend can run it at 60fps on Intel HD 4000 so it's extremely easy to run and won't even use near all of the GPU. Try games like Metro Last Light, Battlefield 4 etc. But otherwise, great review thanks!

 

War Thunder is not a bad benchmark, it's just that the main point of a War Thunder benchmark is for memory bandwith.* It uses little GPU horsepower, but is very, very easily bottlenecked by too little VRAM or slow population of VRAM. Also with an Intel 4000 series some graphical options will not be available in the settings.

 

*: My stock GTX 470 1280MB did a whole 10-15 better FPS than my brother's overclocked EVGA 560Ti 448 core version with 1GB of VRAM. The 256MB of VRAM extra on the 470 made a huge difference, even if they're pretty much the same GPU with the only difference being power efficiency.

 

That said, moving up to 2GB of VRAM on a 192 bit bus on what I now have (GTX 760) was less of an improvement than 470 -> 560Ti.

 

War Thunder is probably the most well optimized PC game on the planet. Looks so fantastic, yet is so light. Russian wizards.

[Tim Drake]

War Thunder is not a bad benchmark, it's just that the main point of a War Thunder benchmark is for memory bandwith.* It uses little GPU horsepower, but is very, very easily bottlenecked by too little VRAM or slow population of VRAM. Also with an Intel 4000 series some graphical options will not be available in the settings.

 

*: My stock GTX 470 1280MB did a whole 10-15 better FPS than my brother's overclocked EVGA 560Ti 448 core version with 1GB of VRAM. The 256MB of VRAM extra on the 470 made a huge difference, even if they're pretty much the same GPU with the only difference being power efficiency.

 

That said, moving up to 2GB of VRAM on a 192 bit bus on what I now have (GTX 760) was less of an improvement than 470 -> 560Ti.

 

War Thunder is probably the most well optimized PC game on the planet. Looks so fantastic, yet is so light. Russian wizards.

 

The reason they could optimise it so well is because all they need to render at such high quality textures is the planes considering you will barely need to render the ground that high.

[That Norwegian Guy]

The reason they could optimise it so well is because all they need to render at such high quality textures is the planes considering you will barely need to render the ground that high.

 

The point is that you CAN choose to max out the fidelity of the ground and it'll still look amazing while running smoothly. And remember, in ground forces now, you can both drive tanks and planes in the same battles and the way it seamlessly switches between the two LOD stages is pretty freaking impressive on a technological level. I would love to get my hands on whatever engine they're using.

 

Also consider the fully simulated projectile physics, I wonder if it is perhaps a little CPU bound because of it, I've never been able to notice though as my 3570K has almost always been ran at 4.8Ghz.

[Tim Drake]

The point is that you CAN choose to max out the fidelity of the ground and it'll still look amazing while running smoothly. And remember, in ground forces now, you can both drive tanks and planes in the same battles and the way it seamlessly switches between the two LOD stages is pretty freaking impressive on a technological level. I would love to get my hands on whatever engine they're using.

 

Also consider the fully simulated projectile physics, I wonder if it is perhaps a little CPU bound because of it, I've never been able to notice though as my 3570K has almost always been ran at 4.8Ghz.

 

But for example, if you play Tanks compared to planes then you lose a lot of frames because the ground needs to look prettier as you are spending your time on the ground.

[That Norwegian Guy]

But for example, if you play Tanks compared to planes then you lose a lot of frames because the ground needs to look prettier as you are spending your time on the ground.

 

Hmm I'd say for me the performance seems consistent between air and ground though. Are you using cinematic clouds?

[Tim Drake]

Hmm I'd say for me the performance seems consistent between air and ground though. Are you using cinematic clouds?

 

This was before I had my new computer. This was when I had an i3-2100 and a HIS 5770. Now I don't see anything below 110 maxed out on War Thunder

It was probably my processor holding me back.