GIGABYTE GTX 970 XTREME GAMING Review

NVIDIA’s GTX 970 with GIGABYTE’s XTREME GAMING treatment. GV-N970XTREME-4GD features WindForce 3X cooling, a factory overclock and much more!

Product on Review: GV-N970XTREME-4GD
Manufacturer & Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £299 GBP / $500 USD

Back in November GIGABYTE extended XTREME GAMING support to other NVIDIA variants after the successful launch of the series with the GTX 950. The philosophy behind XTREME GAMING is quite simple – deliver outstanding, performance, cooling, outlook, protection and durability and so as you may have guessed, each graphics card will be given that premium treatment, squeezing out the very best.

Today we are to look at the GTX 970 XTREME GAMING. GIGABYTE has taken this mid-high end graphics card and equipped it with the highly revered WindForce 3x cooling system, applied a factory overclock and kitted it out with customisable LED Lighting. Combine these very attribute with the feature-set that XTREME GAMING brings and we have a rather exciting proposition in the spotlight today.

GIGABYTE on their XTREME GAMING series

With the successful debut of the GTX 950 XTREME GAMING graphics card, GIGABYTE, the world’s leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, is ready to roll out five more high-end cards in its premium XTREME GAMING lineup, each crafted with overpowering performance, astonishing design, and added gamer-centric features to take gaming experience to a whole new level.

The latest XTREME GAMING series offerings include TITAN X (GV-NTITANXXTREME-12GD-B), GTX 980 Ti WINDFORCE Edition (GV-N98TXTREME-6GD) and WATERFORCE Edition (GV-N98TXTREME W-6GD), GTX 980 (GV-N980XTREME-4GD), and GTX 970 (GV-N970XTREME-4GD). From unmatched gaming prowess to rock-solid durability, these new XTREME GAMING graphics cards are redesigned inside and out to meet the needs of enthusiastic gamers who relentlessly challenge themselves for reaching their ultimate performance.

Technical Specifications

Below are the techncial specifications directly from GIGABYTE’s website:

Chipset
GeForce GTX 970
Digital max resolution
4096 X 2160
Analog max resolution
2048 x 1536
Core Clock
Base/Boost clock: 1190 / 1342 MHz (standard:1051/1178)
Memory Clock
7100 MHz
Process Technology
28 nm
Memory Size
4 GB
Memory Bus
256 bit
Card Bus
PCI-E 3.0
Memory Type
GDDR5
DirectX
12
[n]OpenGL
4.4
PCB Form
ATX
Multi-view
4
I/O
Dual-link DVI-I*1/HDMI*1/Display Port*3
Suggested Power requirement
600W (with two 8-pin external power connector)
Card Size
H=42 L=279 W=121 mm

Packaging & Bundle

Since we’re dealing with the XTREME GAMING line, our graphics card comes packaged with the respective livery. The front uses that XTREME GAMING emblem while over on the reverse there is a break-down of the integral features, including the technical specifications.

Inside, there is an inner box which contains the card and the accessories. The card is encased with some foam padding and there is a small assortment of bundled items. They are as follows:

• Driver/Software CD
• Sweatband
• 1x Power Cables – Y-cable (8pin to dual 6-pin)
• Installation Guide

Closer Look (With Cooler)

The basis for XTREME GAMING is of course the revered WindForce 3x cooling system. This cooler surrounds the PCB and internal components as is the first thing which takes the attention.

Overall the design with its metal shroud looks rather sleek and will likely pair up with other hardware very well.

The actual size of this graphics card is: 42x 279x 121 mm, which isn’t necessarily that big for a graphics card of this calibre. Compared to other GIGABYTE cards which use the WindForce cooling solution, there are some slight modifications to the design which we’ll cover over on the next page of this review.

Flipping the card over, on the reverse we have a large steel backplate which protects the components on our graphics card and also prevents it from flexing or bending. Having such a feature on a graphics card is encouraging as it provides rigidity and prevents potential damage.

GIGABYTE has given the backplate some cut-outs to provide some ventilation.

Using WindForce x3, our graphics card uses a triple fan configuration. GIGABYTE has given these cooling fans a unique blade design which should realise 23% better airflow compared to the reference cooler.

Further to this each of the cooling fans and the WindForce logo glow once the graphics card has power and there are additional indicators for “STOP” and “SILENT”. When the graphics card is only being used for light usage the “STOP” LED will illuminate and the cooling fans will stop spinning – As shown in our video review.

Although the GTX 980/980Ti are reserved for ultra-high resolution gaming our GTX 970 comes with a generous supply of display ports which extend to 4K:

• 1x DVI-I port (Up to 2K)
• 3x DisplayPort 1.2 (4K @ 60Hz)
• 1x HDMI 2.0 port (4K @ 60 Hz)

All of these ports are gold-plated and having such a nice selection of ports paves the way for multi-screen configurations and ensures you’re able to run the card at optimum settings.

As is customary for an NVIDIA graphics card, our GTX 970 arrives with multi-SLI ports which allows us to pair up this card with more than one other graphics card.

The reference GTX 970 requires 6+8pin PCI express power but our XTREME GAMING requires 8+8pin – the custom PCB, factory overclock and upgraded components allude to needing more power. As per the technical specifications, GIGABYTE suggest using a 600W PSU to effectively run this graphics card.

Closer Look (Without Cooler)

The WindForce cooling solution is renowned among graphics enthusiasts for its ability to deliver low-temperatures and low-noise. For many years now, GIGABYTE has been using this system and as you’ll see in our benchmark tests for the temperature results – they don’t fail to impress, again.

The basis for our cooler is a heatsink comprised of aluminium fins, a copper baseplate which is connected to six composite copper heatpipes. One of these heatpipes is 6mm while the others are 8mm.

With the WindForce cooler detached from the graphics card we can see take a look at the inner-workings and see the inner-workings of our graphics card.

It won’t come as any surprise that the PCB for XTREME GAMING is long than the original, reference design.

The driving force behind our GTX 970 is of course NVIDIA’s Maxwell GM204. This GPU comprises of 5.2 million transistors created by the 28nm TSMIC process. GIGABYTE has applied a factory overclock to this card, increasing the GPU clock from 1050MHz to 1190MHz (1342MHz GPU boost) and the memory clock from 7012MHz to 7100MHz.

Our graphics card employs a 12-phase power design and thanks to the XTREME GAMING classification, this GTX 970 features Titan-X grade components; so all of the chokes, and CAPs are upgraded to withstand greater tolerance.

Further to this GIGABYTE are also using “Aerospace-grade PCB coating” which protects against humidity, super-low temperatures and water coolant leaks.

So bearing all this in mind, we’re left in no doubt of this graphics card’s capabilities. Over the next series of pages we’ll be running this graphics card through our benchmarking suite.

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

With the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X79 setup to the very latest X99 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic, achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of GDDR4 at 2666MHz and a 500GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
GIGABYTE GTX 970 XTREME GAMING (Forceware 361.43)
ASUS MATRIX GTX 980Ti PLATINUM (Forceware 358.91)
ASUS STRIX GTX 980Ti DC3 OC (Forceware 353.30)
SAPPHIRE R9 Fury X (Catalyst 15.15)
XFX R9 390X Double Dissipation (Catalyst 15.15)
MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G (Catalyst 15.15)
NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti 6GB (Forceware 352.90)
ZOTAC GTX 970 AMP! EXTREME CORE(Forceware 344.75)
ZOTAC GTX 970 AMP! EXTREME(Forceware 344.75)
MSI GTX 970 GAMING 4G(Forceware 344.75)
GIGABYTE G1 GAMING SOC GTX 970(Forceware 344.75)
ASUS STRIX GTX 970 4GB GDDR5(Forceware 340.60)
NVIDIA GTX 980 4GB GDDR5(Forceware 340.52)
SAPPHIRE TRI-X R9-290X 4GB GDDR5(Catalyst 14.3)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR RM Series™ RM1000
Hard Drive – CORSAIR Force Series™ LX 512GB SATA 3 6Gb/s SSD
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2868 PQU

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we have chosen:

Battlefield 4
Watchdogs
Company of Heroes 2
Thief
GRID: 2
Metro: Last Light

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Furmark which was ran for 15 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result.

Acoustics

The WindForce X3 cooling system is very quiet. Even under full load the triple fan configuration outputs very little noise at all – take a look and listen on our video.

Overclocking

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3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is a 2013 first-person shooter video game developed by Swedish video game developer EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and is perhaps currently the most popular online First Person Shooter for PC gamers. It has an extremely powerful gaming engine that will stress components more than most FPS titles available.

Watchdogs

Watch Dogs is a 2014 open world action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Set within a fictionalized version of Chicago, Illinois, the single-player story follows a hacker and his efforts to seek revenge after the accidental death of his niece. The open world design lets players freely roam Chicago, which includes the urban city, open countryside, and slums. The game is played from a third-person perspective and its world is navigated on-foot or by vehicle. As such this is a very demanding game, especially when graphical options are turned up.

Thief

Thief is a stealth video game developed by the Canadian video game developer Eidos Montreal, and published by Square Enix. It is a revival of the cult classic Thief series of stealth games, of which it is the fourth game. Thief is set in a dark fantasy world inspired by Victorian, gothic, and steampunk aesthetics. Using a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 it makes for a challenging game to pitch against our range of components.

Company of Heroes 2

Company of Heroes 2 is a real-time strategy video game developed by Relic Entertainment. It is the sequel to the critically acclaimed 2006 game Company of Heroes.As with the original Company of Heroes, the game is set in World War II but with the focus on the Eastern Front, with players primarily controlling the side of the Soviet Red Army during various stages of the Eastern Front, from Operation Barbarossa to the Battle of Berlin. Company of Heroes 2 runs on Relic Entertainment’s proprietary Essence 3.0 game engine and is extremely demanding of both CPU and GPU.

Metro Last Light

Metro: Last Light is a single-player post-apocalyptic-themed first-person shooter video game with stealth and survival horror elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, part of the universe of the novel Metro 2033 and its sequels, written by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. The second of our FPS titles, it runs on the 4A gaming engine which again, has the capability to stress even the best GPU components.

GRID 2

Grid 2 (stylised as GRID 2 and known as Race Driver Grid 2 in Japan) is a racing video game developed and published by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008’s Race Driver: Grid. The game includes numerous real world locations and cities such as Paris. It also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility. It uses the EGO 3.0 engine which while not overly challenging, is representative of games of this genre.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

GIGABYTE has made a wise move by extending the XTREME GAMING support to other NVIDIA graphics cards in the range and the GTX 970 today, responds to this treatment very well indeed.

The WindForce cooling system has been the go-to solution over the years and today’s results are testament as to why WindForce has been so popular. Not only do we have super-low temperatures (even with a factory overclock) but the acoustics are especially quiet during sustained usage. Additional to this, GIGABYTE has equipped our graphics card with 3D-active fan technology – rendering the fans motionless under light load. So if you aren’t performing demanding tasks the graphics card will remain silent.

The introduction of LED lighting is something of a novelty. Whilst we appreciate not everyone favours flashy lighting inside their computer chassis, it really does enhance the overall look of the graphics card and there are up to 16.8 million colours available with different animations/themes. If you’d like to see how effective the LEDs are, check out our video review.

After receiving a healthy factory overclock, this GTX 970 responds well in the gaming arena. At 4K resolutions this graphics card did present some low framerates, so we recommend 1080p/1440p resolutions instead if you’re wanting to maintain higher framerates (4K is really reserved for the 980/980Ti). What surprised us the most about the GTX 970 XTREME GAMING was its ability to overclock even further than the factory overclock milestone. We managed to push the GPU and memory clock speeds to such a point that we can now verify this to be our best overclock for the GTX 970. This qualifies GIGABYTE’s ethos with XTREME GAMING – that these graphics cards are optimised for performance and are laden with premium components.

The GTX 970 XTREME GAMING is somewhat more expensive than other custom designs. It arrives at a cost of £300 GBP / $500 USD. Taking into account the perks that this card brings with its stylish aesthetics, LED lighting, low-noise/temperatures and overclocking prowess we are confident it brings plenty of value to the table.

GIGABYTE has given NVIDIA’s GTX 970 a significant makeover with the XTREME GAMING treatment. This graphics card excels in just about every area you could conceive and it confidently receives our seal of approval.

VIDEO REVIEW – VORTEZ TV

Pros
+ Stylish design
+ Customisable LED lighting
+ Low-noise
+ Low-temperatures
+ Great performance
+ Overclocks even further
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ 3 years warranty

Cons
– None!

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.