Asus Strix GeForce GTX970 Review: Flagship-like performance on a budget

Asus Strix GeForce GTX970 detailed review

Asus’s Strix GeForce 970 looks pretty good, it has dual 90mm fans which are activated when temperatures creep up into the mid-60s.  They’re calling it 0 dBi technology and the card is pretty silent. Even with FurMark putting the squeeze on the card, the noise level was very low. The peak temperature we noticed was 69 degrees and the average temperature remains higher than other cards but as long as it stays within the thermal threshold you’re good.

The base clock of 1114 MHz is 64 MHz higher than stock. And the boost clock is at 1253 MHz which again is greater than the boost clock on stock cards by 75 MHz. While running our benchmarks on this card we noticed that the Asus Strix GeForce GTX 970 performs as well as two GTX 760s in SLI which is saying a lot about the card. And it does all of this while drawing power from a single 8-pin power connector while the 760s use 4x 6-pin connectors. So when you compare it to a GTX 980, the latter is obviously going to be ahead and the difference is 10-20 FPS with certain games getting another extra 10 FPS.

At the end of the day, the GTX 970 costs 60 per-cent of what a GTX 980 comes for but performs at about 90 per-cent of the GTX 980. You can see how this plays out when it comes to getting your money’s worth. And the ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 970, which comes with a factory overclock, is better compared to a stock card.

Specifications

Chipset: GM204
Base clock: 1114MHz
Memory clock: 1753MHz
CUDA cores: 1664
Texture Units: 104
ROPs: 64
Manufacturing process: 28nm
PCIe 3.0, 4096 x 2160 digital resolution support, 4 GB Memory
DirectX support: 12
OpenGL support: 4.5
Power Connectors: 8Pin
TDP: 145+W
Dimensions (LxWxD): 140 x 280 x 40mm
Warranty - 3 years warranty