Manufacturer: Gigabyte Price: $ 400 / $ 600 US Author: Steven Walton Date: 09/18/2014

[ Introduction ]

Today Nvidia is launching its latest GeForce 900 series with the introduction of the GTX 980 and GTX 970. These new Maxwell GPU’s promise dramatically improved efficiency over Kepler along with a number of other exciting new features. For testing we have the new Gigabyte G1 Gaming graphics cards which are equipped with the latest revision of their iconic WindForce X3 cooler... Nvidia debuted its GeForce 700 series back in February of 2013 with the 2688 CUDA core GeForce GTX Titan. A few months later they followed up with the GeForce GTX 770 and GTX 780, while the flagship GeForce GTX 780 Ti was released 9 months later boasting an incredible 2880 core. Based on the same Kepler architecture as the GeForce 600 series before it, the 700 series really pushed the technology to its limits. While the GeForce GTX 770 was essentially a rebadged GTX 680 with faster memory, the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti were new products, though they featured the same architecture. However there was one GeForce 700 series GPU that wasn’t built using the Kepler architecture and instead featured the next-generation Maxwell architecture. That GPU was of course the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, a low-end budget part priced at just $150. Still, what the GTX 750 Ti lacked in performance it certainly made up for in efficiency. In terms of frame rate performance the GTX 750 Ti was similar to the GTX 650 Ti Boost and yet on paper it should have been at least 20% slower. The GTX 650 Ti featured 20% more cores, 60% more TAU’s and 50% more ROPs. Meanwhile the GTX 750 Ti featured a mere 5% core clock speed advantage with a 10% memory clock speed disadvantage. Yet thanks to the updated Maxwell architecture the GTX 750 Ti was able to match the GTX 650 Ti Boost and in some cases even beat it. What’s more, the GTX 750 Ti did so while using around 20% less power, granted it featured 20% less cores but still the power savings were impressive. This then had us excited for more powerful Maxwell graphics cards, and today we finally have them. Granted more powerful Maxwell GPU’s are sure to follow in the future, but for now we have the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980. Priced at $330 the GTX 970 is around $70 cheaper than the Radeon R9 290 and $30 more than the R9 280X. The GTX 980 on the other hand is going for a whopping $550, only slightly less than the $650 MSRP of the GTX 780. At that price the GTX 980 comes in at around the same price as the Radeon R9 290X. With these two new Maxwell cards aimed at taking on the Radeon R9 280X/290 and R9 290X we are expecting good things in terms of performance. But before we jump to the benchmarks let’s check out the new Gigabyte G1 Gaming cards we have for testing.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 970 & GTX 980 New Maxwell Features Test System Specs Benchmarks: Crysis 3, BioShock Benchmarks: Metro Last Light, Tomb Raider Benchmarks: Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield 4 Benchmarks: Thief, Watch Dogs Power Consumption & Temperatures Overclocking Performance Final Thoughts Next Page ->

Happy

Posted on: 09/19/2014 10:50 AM Fantastic cooling performance from Gigabyte. Getting rid of my 290 to get a 970 Maybe two

Master

Posted on: 09/20/2014 09:31 AM Just got a pair of 970s for SLI Booyakasha!

Posta

Posted on: 09/20/2014 05:09 PM AMD need to pull their finger out. They are getting smashed on power, efficiency, performance and price.

Mephisto Posts: 1 Joined: 2016-02-19

Posted on: 02/19/2016 08:21 PM got my two G1 980s at 1500mhz core clock and 8260mhz memory clock