** EDIT ** Windows 10 was running in power saver mode. Under Power Options was a "hidden" additional plan High Performance which I selected. New result: 10,681 (+6% average G1 gaming GTX970) New O/C result: 12,063 The card is great, I'm the lemon. ** EDIT ** I got a Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming GPU from Amazon today (it's a rev 1.1) and have been running some benchmarks and it looks like it under-performs a regular 970. Running 3dMark (Fire Strike), from what I can tell you would expect these kinds of averages: Vanilla 970: 9,568 G1 gaming 970: 10,046 G1 gaming 970 OC: 11,427 My scores range from 8,141 to 9,155 (at its worst 20% slower than a regular g1 gaming card). On 3D mark it shows my score under-performing a lot of other systems 3dMark 8,828. Running Heaven and comparing my results to similar system builds/settings I also get low scores (1,209) and min/max FPS (7/90). Heaven settings: Render: Direct3D11 Mode: 1920x1080 8xAA fullscreen Quality: Ultra Tessellation: Extreme I don't think another part of the system is a bottleneck as the rest of the components are pretty decent: Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming 4GB Drivers: 358.50 CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz (and Noctua NH-U12S Cooler) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SOC Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury White 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive Power Supply: Corsair RM 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX OS: Windows 10 (64-bit) I read the nVidia experience stuff could drop the card into a non-performance mode/2d or something like that so I did a clean install of only the (latest) drivers. Do you think I have drawn a crappy card, or is this kind of deviation from the average normal? Another theory I had was that first release window cards may be better than a card a year later as they think most enthusiasts buy early? It's from Amazon and they're great at returning no questions asked so no problems to RMA it. I'm not worried about getting a different brand/model if anyone thinks another 970 is a better option. I REALLY hate noisy fans, though when not gaming I can set the bios to not spin say sub 40C). My last build was about 13 years ago (lol!) and it had a Radeon 9700, so really wanted to get an nVidia card this time around. Many thanks for your help/advice

Is my brand new Gigabyte G1 gaming GTX970 a lemon (no, it's geat. I had power saving enabled in Windows 10 and the CPU was throttling the results)

By d510r9
October 8, 2015 in Graphics Cards

Go to solution Solved by Majestic, October 8, 2015

That combined score is really weak.

Go to the Nvidia control panel, manage 3D settings, and change the "Power management mode" to Prefer maximum performance, and see if that makes a difference. Also at around 60-70% fan speeds the card starts to get noisy (aka the loudest part of my rig) if mine is anything to go by

No, the GPU score is fine. The Combined score is weak.

CPU score is weak as hell for a 4790K. I think something is wrong with that. Make sure it's running at the correct clockspeed, i think it's throttling.

Posted October 9, 2015

Author

Yeah, but you don't want to use High performance 24/7, as it stops the chip from clocking back down during idle. Balanced is what you want, that still gives you max boost but also power saving options.

Yeah, it was either power saving features or disabled speedstepping. It's pretty amazing though what you can achieve with a haswell chip running 1ghz

awesome, thanks for that. Changed it to balanced.

I think it was even less than that (800 MHz, not even 1.21 gigawatts)

CPU: i7-4790K 4.0GHz Mobo: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SOC ATX LGA1150 RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury White (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming PSU: Corsair RM 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 500GB SSD Case: NZXT H440