GeForce GTX 980 and 970 Cards From MSI, EVGA, and Zotac Reviewed
MojoKid writes: In all of its iterations, NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture has proven to be a good performing, power-efficient GPU thus far. At the high-end of the product stack is where some of the most interesting products reside, however. When NVIDIA launches a new high-end GPU, cards based on the company's reference design trickle out first, and then board partners follow up with custom solutions packing unique cooling hardware, higher clocks, and sometimes additional features. With the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980, NVIDIA's board partners were ready with custom solutions very quickly. These three custom GeForce cards, from enthusiast favorites EVGA, MSI, and Zotac represent optimization at the high-end of Maxwell. Two of the cards are GTX 980s: the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G and the Zotac GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omgea, the third is a GTX 970 from EVGA, their GeForce GTX 970 FTW with ACX 2.0. Besides their crazy long names, all of these cards are custom solutions, that ship overclocked from the manufacturer. In testing, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 was the fastest, single-GPU available. The custom, factory overclocked MSI and Zotac cards cemented that fact. Overall, thanks to a higher default GPU-clock, the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G was the best performing card. EVGA's GeForce GTX 970 FTW was also relatively strong, despite its alleged memory bug. Although, as expected, it couldn't quite catch the higher-end GeForce GTX 980s, but occasionally outpaced the AMD's top-end Radeon R9 290X.
What surprises me is that these manufacturers are advertising the cards as supporting DX12, yet at Microsoft's Press Conference, they said that these cards weren't going to support the *entire* DX12 spec... Sort of makes is generation of PC GPUs a "why bother" moment at best, or a deceptive marketing moment at worst.
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Nvidia stepped up its game when the ATIs in the previous generation were quite a challenge. The 900's were there answer and the 290x is not far behind. I want to see ATI deliver a knockout with its next generation chipset this spring/summer.
AMD is really hurting and I DO NOT WANT an nvida monopoly even if I have a 770gtx in my system right now. I was hoping AMD would keep delivering in the next round and get their drivers together.
Good lord the drivers had been an issue last decade and I am surprised they only got serious about improving since 2012. They mostly work but when I had a 7850 I had memorizes which sets of .13 drivers which would BSOD and corrupt my Windows 7 install so bad not even a restore could fix it. Only a re-image.
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gotta ask. Why do Slashdot articles seem to link hothardware a lot, it seems at best an average site that produces reviews weeks after all the good sites have already done them. Why not link to some of the better hardware review sites?
EVGA are pretty famous for dying in 12-18 months. Most people buying them don't care since they're gonna upgrade anyway. MSI's reputation isn't much better, but I know a few people who have had good luck. That said even my brother's Gigabyte GTX 260 only lasted 2 years before the RAM burned out. Too much heat. I bought a 660 w/o thinking about it and I'm hoping it doesn't suffer the same fate (since it's more than enough card for my next 5 years of gaming). I just wish I could buy even a mid range card w/o worrying about the thing dying long before the end of it's useful life.
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The 980 has been out for months. I have one in my PC right now.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Will not buy another card without Displayport 1.3.
They may sound good in principle but I've never had a factory overclocked card last more than a few years regardless which manufacturer produced them. Heck at one point I had a Leadtek which lasted less than a year. On close inspection their massive aftermarket cooler they shipped on the card wasn't actually touching the voltage regulator chips and they were running at a cool 100+ degC.
I'll stick with stock cards from now on.
When did Zotac become any human's "favorite" and when did they suffer their traumatic brain injury? Zotac's business model is propped up by constantly paying for rigged reviews and features in magazines and their cards are failure-prone garbage. How about EVGA, ASUS, and MSI like everyone who knows what they're doing buys?
Zotac GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omega - http://www.zotac.com/products/...
SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
NVIDIA engineer spilling the beans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I miss gaming under Windows 98, when everything just worked.
I don't want anymore to change motherboard, change OS, reconstitute a game library all for the diminishing returns of games looking slightly better and playing the same or worse than 10 years ago.
How did the reviewers miss that the 290X had the fastest minimum frame rates... across the board? Price wise, the 970 is generally more expensive, so it better be faster than a 290X, but mostly it's not.
I think this last set of cards has been great competition, nvidia runs so much cooler, and the laptop cards are amazing. But, AMD is right there with them for performance at every segment under $400.