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GeForce GTX 980 and 970 Cards From MSI, EVGA, and Zotac Reviewed

Posted by Soulskill on from the price-vs.-performance-vs.-really-loud-fans dept.

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.

8 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. !DX12 by tysonedwards · · Score: 2

    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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    1. Re:!DX12 by tysonedwards · · Score: 2

      "Some DX12 features will still need updated GPUs, but all the basic features should work." ExtremeTech

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      Thirty four characters live here.
    2. Re:!DX12 by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      After 970 PR SNAFU where they marketed what is essentially a 3.5GB card with additional 0.5GB of crippled and largely useless VRAM as a full blooded 4GB card because it would otherwise look really bad next to AMD's 4GB cards, I would expect them to market these cards as DX12 compatible even if they really aren't.

      Marketing's job is to deliver sales, even at expense of lying to customers by obfuscating potential and existing problems.

  2. AMD is coming out with the 390 by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    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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  3. Re:Anyone know how Zotac cards hold up? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    It was printed on the graphics card box. Most boards with good caps and certifications loudly advertise it including MSI as well.

    Basically the military certs mean they test to see if it runs between -40F and up to a hot 200F and other tests. Maybe overblown and juding on the language think it is silly, but when most old Pentium IVs XP boxes fail these days it is caused by 2 things
    1. Power supply going out
    2. Caps on the board failing to provide adaquite voltage in spikes causing BSOD.

    Home routers too get weak after a few years due to caps aging. True a gaming system board will be obsolete by then but I do VMware Workstation for certs on mind too and mostly run MMOs so no biggie. I have a feeling by 2020 my i7 4770K will still be competitive as cpus have leveled off in major upgrades compared to the past where 10 years meant 10,000 times faster. A 1990 386 16 MHz vs a Pentium IV was quite impressive in differences. Not true today.

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  4. SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer by Roman+Mamedov · · Score: 3, Interesting

    SHOCKING interview with Nvidia engineer about the 970 fiasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  5. Re:Anyone know how Zotac cards hold up? by WuphonsReach · · Score: 2

    Asus (and a lot of other manufs) had trouble with bad caps all the way up until ~2007 give or take. When they go, it is a very loud pop (along with the smell of electricity arcing) that will make you jump if you are in the same room.

    I've had quite a few fanless video cards with bad capacitors, along with a few motherboards from the mid-2000s.

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  6. Bored by Blaskowicz · · Score: 2

    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.