Gigabyte GTX970 Windforce, My Review of it

[AcidzDesigns]

Ok so here it goes, this is my review of the Gigabyte Windforce GTX970. My first impression was when I received the package is that this card is a monster by the size of the box, but when I opened it Gigabyte used a lot of foam packing inside the box. I ordered the card from Scan.co.uk the box was damaged during shipping, I don’t know if it was dropped at Scan or by the shipping company as you can see in the image below. But the card was fine anyways so I am fine with that.

 

 

 

When I got the card out of the box and installed it in my rig, I notice the side of the card where you plug in the PCI-E power cables that there is a massive drop from the PCB to that one side, there is an image showing this below.

 

 

 

Inside the box it came with a Driver CD as it should but I downloaded the newest version from NIVIDA’s site anyways, it also came with a Molex to 6-pin and a Molex to 8-pin adapters in case you didn’t have enough PCI-e power cables available or there being used elsewhere. But if you need to use these adpaters I suggest you get a new psu aswell.

 

When I got the card all setup and installed I decided that I will bench mark some games, I forgot to record the GPU temps for the benchmarks, but before I ran MSI Kombuster and done a benchmark before i ran the benchmark and the temps didn’t go over around 60c which  I was happy with. The games I benchmarked are Battlefield 3, Shadows of Mordor, Far Cry 4.

 

For Battlefield 3 it was set to the ultra pre-set in the game with the resolution of 1920x1080 at 60Hz as I don’t have a 1440p or 4k panel I won’t be testing this. During the benchmark I loaded a multiplayer game of Operation Metro and play for around 5mins. Here are my results of it

Min FPS: 40

Max FPS: 147

Avg FPS: 92

 

I didn’t notice any massive frame drops during the benchmark only when there was an explosion or when I got killed the screen sort of went black for a sec then back on, This card handled the game really well, I would have tested BF4 but I don’t have the game for me to benchmark it.

 

 

 

The next game I benchmarked was Middle Earth Shadows of Mordor, one of my favourite games that came out this year so far. For the settings of the game I ran it at ultra and OMG does this game look so damn sexy on ultra, it’s a must to play this year. Ok so into the benchmark, I played the first mission straight after when you get killed and also along with your wife and son at the very start, I got into a big fight and just blocked all the attacks and killed them, that was my benchmark for 2 minutes, here are the results.

Max FPS: 101

Min FPS: 47

Avg FPS: 71

 

I really didn’t feel any massive frame drops or lag during the benchmark this card really handled the game well, I would definitely recommend this card to anyone at this point onwards. Even with the game on ultra and everything turn up as high as it can go it was a fun experience for me to play and benchmark this card.

 

Ok now for far cry 4, as many people know that this game contains a lot of bugs so hopefully it goes well, for the benchmark it will be on the high pre-set so I can get a playable experience. OK well here are the results

Max FPS: 59

Min FPS: 27

Avg FPS: 40

 

I thought this card would do a lot better that this, it’s such a monster card, I would say if I done abit of overclocking on the card and tweaked with the in game settings I would get a better result, but anyways it still was playable.

 

Well for my conclusion of this card, is that it. This card can destroy a lot of the games that are out they, the cooler that is on the card is outstanding the card stay really cool during the benchmarks. The fans that are on the heatskink are really surprisingly quite I can’t hear them over my hard drive that I have all my games stored on, This card get a seal of approval from me.

 

Thank you guys for reading this review, I will be most likely be doing more in the furture

 

-Acidz

 

 

[ZetZet]

FYI, you should NEVER accept damaged packages.

[Archangel1994]

@AcidzDesigns

 

IF you are using the 970 with your FX-6100 you have a pretty bad bottleneck, get a better CPU

[cooperb21]

That sir is a bottleneck. 

 

970 easily gets average 60fps in farcry 4.

 

Your max should not be 59fps wtf. 

[jam1234]

FYI, you should NEVER accept damaged packages.

True, but he might have seen if it was just the internal box (the one from gigabyte with the GPU in).

[AcidzDesigns]

I am planing on selling the pc, once i do i will be upgrading to a i5 4670k 

[Enderman]

your CPU is a bottleneck

[SteveGrabowski]

I have been using AMD CPUs since the 90s until finally going team blue in 2014, but my heart is still with AMD. Nevertheless, when I read threads saying the 970 isn't living up to the hype I go check the OP's profile and it seems like 100% of the time the CPU being used is an Fx-something. Someone should catalog all these threads into a list to post ever time someone asks whether to go with an i5 or 6100/8320/8350/9590 for their new 970 build

[SoftenButterCream]

Wrong section doe

[AcidzDesigns]

I have been using AMD CPUs since the 90s until finally going team blue in 2014, but my heart is still with AMD. Nevertheless, when I read threads saying the 970 isn't living up to the hype I go check the OP's profile and it seems like 100% of the time the CPU being used is an Fx-something. Someone should catalog all these threads into a list to post ever time someone asks whether to go with an i5 or 6100/8320/8350/9590 for their new 970 build

Im been using this CPU for the past 2 years, i have built pc's for people and ive used AMD CPUS in them and they said that they love it, but for a change id like to go intel, but i was considering going with a 8350