Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming Review: Despite the controversy, it’s still a good card

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming detailed review

We’d reviewed Gigabyte’s GTX 960 G1 Gaming two months back. The design of the GTX 970 G1 Gaming is very similar to that of the GTX 960. Both cards have a pretty decent overclocking headroom and start off a little ahead of the stock card as far as base and boost clock speeds are concerned. The GTX 970 G1’s clock speed of 1175 MHz is 125 MHz greater than stock card and compared to the ASUS STRIX GTX 970 this SKU with it’s higher clock scores better in synthetic benchmarks by a margin of around 7 percent but gaming benchmarks only revealed a 3-5 percent lead over the other.

When it comes to cooling performance, the extra fan on the Gigabyte SKU resulted in a difference of four degrees Celsius at peak load. Idle temperatures weren’t differentiated by a noticeable amount. The recent unravelling regarding its memory arrangement has raised quite a few questions about the viability of the GTX 970. The fact is that as long as the game in question does not exceed 3.5 GBs of VRAM usage, you aren’t going to feel any of the side-effects. So if you are running your games on a 1080p display then fret not, the only thing that can cause greater RAM usage on a 1080p display is poor coding or using high quality texture packs or enabling Dynamic Super Resolution. So keep that in mind if you are going in for a GTX 970.

Specifications
Base clock: 1175 MHz
Memory clock: 1750 MHz
Stream processors: 1664
Texture Units: 104, ROPs: 64
Memory: 3.5+0.5 GB
Power Connectors: 8Pin + 6Pin
TDP: 150 W