deciding on a new vid card. GTX 970?

[Andovar]

Might be a little off-topic here, but since I'm upgrading my vid card with the eventual goal of setting up a DK2, i think it applies.

So I've been looking at countless card comparisons on gpuboss, and scouring the reviews on newegg.
Basically looking between the Radeon R9 series, and the nvidia GTX 900 series.
I think the radeon is out mainly because the higher end of the r9 series are insane power hogs, and I don't feel like having to replace my power supply too.
So I think I pretty much settled on the GTX 970. But there's still two concerns. According to a lot of reviews, there's 2 problems with it:

1) coil whine.
I honestly don't know what this is, but it certainly sounds annoying.

2) only 3.5GB of "real" ram on the 4GB card?
Another one i'm not completely clear on. But apparently some of the cards have 512MB of cheaper/slower VRAM on them, and that can cause perf hits when under high load?

Are the GTX 970 users around here happy with theirs? Any issues? Any particular card vendor you prefer, or avoid?
Normally I would have just bought the damn thing by now, but for $350, I want to make sure I'm getting what I want.

 

[Desert63]

Interesting that you focused on those two things as I just ordered a 970 last night and I too was concerned about those same things. It was these two things that made me hesitate and even though I just invested in a 970 I would love to be told those things arent a problem.
The reason I choose Nvidia though was the more complete guides on this forum for configuring Nvidia, so I didnt want to re-invent the wheel when it comes to setup.

Might be a little off-topic here, but since I'm upgrading my vid card with the eventual goal of setting up a DK2, i think it applies.

So I've been looking at countless card comparisons on gpuboss, and scouring the reviews on newegg.
Basically looking between the Radeon R9 series, and the nvidia GTX 900 series.
I think the radeon is out mainly because the higher end of the r9 series are insane power hogs, and I don't feel like having to replace my power supply too.
So I think I pretty much settled on the GTX 970. But there's still two concerns. According to a lot of reviews, there's 2 problems with it:

1) coil whine.
I honestly don't know what this is, but it certainly sounds annoying.

2) only 3.5GB of "real" ram on the 4GB card?
Another one i'm not completely clear on. But apparently some of the cards have 512MB of cheaper/slower VRAM on them, and that can cause perf hits when under high load?

Are the GTX 970 users around here happy with theirs? Any issues? Any particular card vendor you prefer, or avoid?
Normally I would have just bought the damn thing by now, but for $350, I want to make sure I'm getting what I want.

 

[xondk]

1) coil whine.
I honestly don't know what this is, but it certainly sounds annoying.

2) only 3.5GB of "real" ram on the 4GB card?
Another one i'm not completely clear on. But apparently some of the cards have 512MB of cheaper/slower VRAM on them, and that can cause perf hits when under high load?

1: I'm waiting for my 970 gtx to arrive, I've listened to some video's with "coil whine" and I really cannot hear anything, though I have tinnitus, so higher pitched sounds can be masked by it, that said though I really doubt it is an issue, I haven't really heard that much about it, so yeah, I don't know if it really is an issue unless you have your computer right next to you and no side on. But my brothers 970 gtx strix is silent, very silent.

2: yes, the card's 'last' 500 mb of ram is slower then the rest, however it does have 4gb of ram, you have to remember that while some people report stuttering, the 970 gtx is selling like I don't know what, and the amount of 'problems' reported with the ram is limited compared to the sale amount, since even if the ram is slower it is still around 4x faster then computer ram. Some say it causes stuttering but from a technical point stuttering can be caused by a million things including the game they play, and vram is not likely the cause.

- - - Updated - - -

The reason I choose Nvidia though was the more complete guides on this forum for configuring Nvidia, so I didnt want to re-invent the wheel when it comes to setup.

Personally I chose the 970 gtx I'm waiting for because of performance/price, and the fact that while AMD can make great cards, I like fiddling with stuff and their drivers are notoriously fickle on that point.

 

[Kyokushin]

Might be a little off-topic here, but since I'm upgrading my vid card with the eventual goal of setting up a DK2, i think it applies.

So I've been looking at countless card comparisons on gpuboss, and scouring the reviews on newegg.
Basically looking between the Radeon R9 series, and the nvidia GTX 900 series.
I think the radeon is out mainly because the higher end of the r9 series are insane power hogs, and I don't feel like having to replace my power supply too.
So I think I pretty much settled on the GTX 970. But there's still two concerns. According to a lot of reviews, there's 2 problems with it:

1) coil whine.
I honestly don't know what this is, but it certainly sounds annoying.

2) only 3.5GB of "real" ram on the 4GB card?
Another one i'm not completely clear on. But apparently some of the cards have 512MB of cheaper/slower VRAM on them, and that can cause perf hits when under high load?

Are the GTX 970 users around here happy with theirs? Any issues? Any particular card vendor you prefer, or avoid?
Normally I would have just bought the damn thing by now, but for $350, I want to make sure I'm getting what I want.

I have got gigabyte gtx 970 g1. I am happy.

 

[Bacon Sarnie]

I had a gigabyte OC GTX 970, bought it just before the Vram issue was announced.
I was perfectly happy with the card but found out I would most likely have issues with multi monitor support later down the road.
Might be the same with DK etc
Friend talking me into finding out if I could upgrade, supplier I bought it from were doing a send it back for refund or replacement no quibble deal.
Decided to do so as I had some spare cash.
Now own an Asus Strix GTX 980, did have a SC EVGA 980 but found issues with it and ED kept crashing on it.

Oh and its not some of the cards that have the slower 512mb on them, its all 970's

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970

 

[xondk]

.

Vram issue isn't really going to be an issue if you ask me, other then with tripple monitor setups I guess, but other then that yeah...
One of the things I've found that uses the most ram, is weirdly enough, motion blur turning that on in say shadows of mordor makes for a lot of ram usage, and given that most motion blur sucks, well yeah..could imagine depth of fields too, and that's a fickle thing as well, really depending on the game.

But yeah 970 is an absolutely great card and the effect of the ram problem is really overdone according to what I can find.

 

[adoredtv]

The 290X and 970 are pretty close in performance so the 970 is clearly better in perf/Watt. If you played for 6 hours every day, 7 day a week, that's gonna cost you another $30 or so per year in electricity.

Under normal circumstances the 970 is the easy winner simply because of that, however you can get 3 games with the R9's, including Star Citizen, with the "Never Settle Space" bundle. I think you get Witcher 3 with the 970 though so look around.

Current generation AMD cards are better suited for VR. Any current-gen Nvidia card will have issues with judder and especially latency because they lack the hardware ACE's to do stuff like timewarp properly. Also Nvidia's VR SLI is woefully lacking compared to AMD's VR Crossfire (Nvidia basically admitted this at GDC last month).

This is all "future" stuff though, not current - talking a year probably before you notice it and maybe even 2 years before games are doing VR properly using AMD's ACE's with DX12 (DX12 and Vulkan are basically identical to Mantle and games devs WILL use AMD's features for removing VR latency). So long as you're prepared to buy a new GPU at that time, the 970 is still a good bet right now. Just be aware that current AMD cards have everything they need now in hardware for stutter and lag-free VR, and stuff like dual 290X's will easily give far better performance than any combination of current Nvidia cards. This is not something Nvidia can fix with drivers, they need a new architecture.

There are new AMD cards coming out in a couple of months, the 390X and a rumoured 390X VR (supposed to be the actual name, probably dual card) but they won't be cheap.

 

[Andovar]

A lot of good info here, thanks for all the responses.

You guys almost had me sold on the 970 until this:

Current generation AMD cards are better suited for VR. Any current-gen Nvidia card will have issues with judder and especially latency because they lack the hardware ACE's to do stuff like timewarp properly. Also Nvidia's VR SLI is woefully lacking compared to AMD's VR Crossfire (Nvidia basically admitted this at GDC last month).

I do enough second guessing on my own man, don't make it worse!

I know you said this is "future stuff", but still, you have me thinking about the r9 290 again.
If it wasn't for the fact that I'd have to get a bigger power supply, I probably would have bought it already. It's not about the extra electricity cost either. I've gotten more lazy in my old age, and really don't feel like tearing apart my PC to put in a new PS.

@Desert63 and xondk,
Can you post back when you get your cards and let us know what you think?
Thanks.

 

[xondk]

@Desert63 and xondk,
Can you post back when you get your cards and let us know what you think?
Thanks.

Sure thing will let you know, though my brother has also gotten a 970 gtx and it Elite insanely smooth on ultra at 1080p granted not 3d but I think any single card in 3d currently needs to run at custom graphic settings for best performance. But will let you know

 

[adoredtv]

A lot of good info here, thanks for all the responses.

You guys almost had me sold on the 970 until this:I do enough second guessing on my own man, don't make it worse!

I know you said this is "future stuff", but still, you have me thinking about the r9 290 again.
If it wasn't for the fact that I'd have to get a bigger power supply, I probably would have bought it already. It's not about the extra electricity cost either. I've gotten more lazy in my old age, and really don't feel like tearing apart my PC to put in a new PSU.

What PSU do you have? Unless you have a really weak PSU it'll probably be ok with a 290X if it would be ok with a 970. I've rarely seen a PSU that can't handle 80W of difference if it has enough connectors.

If you're not bothered about the extra power draw and your current PSU can handle the 290X, there really is no reason to go with the 970. It loses to the 290X in every metric except power consumption.

 

[Andovar]

What PSU do you have? Unless you have a really weak PSU it'll probably be ok with a 290X if it would be ok with a 970. I've rarely seen a PSU that can't handle 80W of difference if it has enough connectors.

If you're not bothered about the extra power draw and your current PSU can handle the 290X, there really is no reason to go with the 970. It loses to the 290X in every metric except power consumption.

Mine is 700W
All the specs I've read say 750W psu is the minimum for the 290x. Also according to gpuboss, the 290 needs twice the power of the 970 (300W vs. 148W).
I haven't ruled the 290 out yet even with needing a new PSU. Plus there were several metrics where the 970 beat the 290 (again according to gpuboss).
So I'm still completely undecided...

Not sure how long the DK2 takes to ship, but I figure I still have time to figure this out.

 

[tetra]

I have a GTX 970, MSI GE version. Purchased as most of us did before the truth about them being actually 3.5 with a slower 500mb sector. To be honest though I have never had any problem with it whatsoever, the amount of titles requiring a full 4 gigs of Vram right now are almost zero, with the exception of a fully modded Skyrim perhaps. I run 2 monitors for desktop and also stream with limelight to an LG G3 for "cheap" VR and have absolutely zero problems with it whatsoever. Can still play on ultra settings even when gamestream is using the GPU's H264 encoder at the same time. As has been said already though in terms of "future proofing" or if you want additional monitor support for gaming then maybe look at a 980. Either way and even with the not so welcome truth about the 970 I would still buy one again even if I had known at the time. Is still a fantastic card with insane performance at its price point.

 

[adoredtv]

Mine is 700W
All the specs I've read say 750W psu is the minimum for the 290x. Also according to gpuboss, the 290 needs twice the power of the 970 (300W vs. 148W).
I haven't ruled the 290 out yet even with needing a new PSU. Plus there were several metrics where the 970 beat the 290 (again according to gpuboss).
So I'm still completely undecided...

Not sure how long the DK2 takes to ship, but I figure I still have time to figure this out.

You can take those figures with a very large pinch of salt tbh. No single-card requires 750W of power and likely never will.

So long as you buy a 290 or 290X with a decent cooler, the power draw remains quite competitive. Take the Powercolor 290 (non X) PCS+ which pulls around 50W more than the 970 Jetstream -

View attachment 31860

It wins some and loses some vs the 970. That's a 290 remember, not a 290X.

If you have a true decent 700W power supply (with 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe connectors), it'll be fine with any single graphics card that needs those connectors.

---

As for Gpuboss...

http://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/43790-misinformation-regarding-gpuboss
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/31mdck/gpuboss_is_not_a_trustworthy_source_of/

Even worse is passmark which I see bandied around here quite a bit too. Don't you find it weird that these benchmark sites get completely different results to the tech press who actually signed an NDA and got the cards sent to them before launch for reviews? When you think about it, how hard would it be for some multi-billion dollar tech company to create a website with fake results making their products appear to be much better than they actually are? Not so difficult I'd imagine.

This is why you should only ever use the real tech press like anandtech, techpowerup, techradar, tomshardware and other websites that have produced actual technology articles over many years, instead of relying on some benchmark comparison site using arbitrary metrics to decide what is better than what. Make no mistake though - even the largest of the tech press are not immune to bribery and threats from some companies and frequently cave with "friendly" reviews. That said if you take your information from a variety of sources, you'll end up with something close to the real performance of each card.

If you do that the 290X and 970 are quite comparable. If it wasn't for the 290X's higher power draw it would be the clear winner in any gaming site. It has actual useable 4GB of VRAM, you get 3 pretty decent games compared to 1, it has more bandwidth also so it'll be better as the years progress as well. For 4K resolutions the 290X is already ahead of the 970, with the 290 non-X right behind.



That benchmark is the total of 24 actual games compared. That's about as accurate as you'll get for how these cards stack up in actual gaming scenarios, and if the same sort of results are seen at any reputable tech site (they are) then you know you're looking at something close to the truth.

As far as VR goes it's hard to imagine any case where current gen Nvidia cards make sense, going forward. They just lack the basic hardware to do it right and no amount of extra raw "speed" is gonna help with the fundamental limitations of the Kepler and Maxwell architectures. Like I said though, you won't see the benefits of AMD's stuff for another year+, probably 2 years anyway.

If you're really not bothered about the power consumption there is only one smart choice here. Literally the only thing going for the 970 is its superior power consumption. For me that would be a major factor which is why I gave the 970 the award over the slower 290 (non X). Now you can get the faster 290X for less I believe, making the 970 a harder sell.

 

[Andovar]

You can take those figures with a very large pinch of salt tbh. No single-card requires 750W of power and likely never will.

Understood. But the PSU also has to power everything else on the system too. I wish there was a software util that could tell the overall current power consumption, so I'd know if I have enough "left in the bank" to move to to the 290x.

Regarding the rest of the info, thanks for that.
I had gone through tomshardware and anandtech (and some others i forget), and tbh, after a while i felt like my eyes were going to bleed. info overload!
gpuboss became a great lazy-man's way out.

At this point I'm pretty much ready to pull the trigger on the 290X. I guess my only question would be if my PSU ends up struggling with it, how will I know? Does the system just shut down when under load? Any risk to damaging components with an underpowered PSU?

 

[djbordie]

Not knocking you adored, you seem well researched. I understand you but its my concesus that nvidia is the clear victor for now and future...the amd stuff is speculative with dx12 and such. Not proven yet. As for raw hp we need to see the 300x or whatever is next from Them and a consumer release of vr to be sure.

I went both feet forward wih nvidia for its superiority in other games and was happy that oculus fully uses nvidida on their testing and demos at shows.

But this isnt meant to be a war about nvidia vs amd

Thoughts?

 

[Simon719]

I an running two MSI 970GTX Gaming cards in SLI, no problem here with any "whine" or "vram" problems, but I don't run super high res though, running at 2715x1697 DRS and all games setting on high or Ultra, runs well on my 28" Monitor at 60Hz/60fps v-sync

From what I read the 290X is better at 4K res and the 970 better at HD res, so all depend on your monitor i guess?

 

[cherbert]

At this point I'm pretty much ready to pull the trigger on the 290X.

I think I may do the same. You need to hurry as there is a cracking deal at Overclockers right now for a 290x for just £230.

 

[Andovar]

I think I may do the same. You need to hurry as there is a cracking deal at Overclockers right now for a 290x for just £230.

It's much cheaper on newegg. $309. Add in the $10 coupon code, and the $20 main in rebate, and it's only $280.

 

[adoredtv]

Understood. But the PSU also has to power everything else on the system too. I wish there was a software util that could tell the overall current power consumption, so I'd know if I have enough "left in the bank" to move to to the 290x.

Regarding the rest of the info, thanks for that.
I had gone through tomshardware and anandtech (and some others i forget), and tbh, after a while i felt like my eyes were going to bleed. info overload!
gpuboss became a great lazy-man's way out.

At this point I'm pretty much ready to pull the trigger on the 290X. I guess my only question would be if my PSU ends up struggling with it, how will I know? Does the system just shut down when under load? Any risk to damaging components with an underpowered PSU?

Check out my PSU video, it explains all of this in detail.

[video=youtube;zKcRDbsWoP8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKcRDbsWoP8[/video]

Not knocking you adored, you seem well researched. I understand you but its my concesus that nvidia is the clear victor for now and future...the amd stuff is speculative with dx12 and such. Not proven yet. As for raw hp we need to see the 300x or whatever is next from Them and a consumer release of vr to be sure.

I'm not really sure how Nvidia is the clear victor. They have some nice cards at the high-end which AMD struggles to compete with on performance per Watt, but on raw performance and price the AMD cards are generally pretty good. For example there's no way I'd pay almost double for a 980 which is only 12% faster than a 290X. Comparing the 970 and 290, the 970 is only a little more expensive than the 290 non-X, and with its superior power draw characteristics it's a slightly better choice for now even with the VRAM shenanigans.

Of course AMD has nothing to compete against the Titan X currently so if you want the very best performance right now you can get it there at a rather extreme price. At the low end, AMD cards are generally much faster and around the same price or cheaper.

I went both feet forward wih nvidia for its superiority in other games and was happy that oculus fully uses nvidida on their testing and demos at shows.

Oculus uses whatever is best to showcase their technology. The reason Nvidia cards get used is because Nvidia normally has the fastest single-GPU card, for example the 780 Ti and 980 were fastest for quite some time - why use slower AMD cards to showcase your tech when you can use faster Nvidia ones? There's nothing else though, it was just pure raw single-gpu gaming speed making that decision.

Oculus were quite happy to showcase Crescent Bay using the 390X at GDC however.

[video=youtube;kn3ngfB1SN4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn3ngfB1SN4&list=PLx15eYqzJifdWZk4ZncBni1b QVJNM40lC[/video]

I have little doubt that going forward, we'll see dual AMD cards for all the Oculus demos. Oculus are using a bunch of AMD-developed tech all of a sudden.

View attachment 31904View attachment 31905

 

[djbordie]

very interesting indeed.

stock clocks aside, most 980s hit above the titanX clock speeds which is exactly the raw HP we are needing to run image screen rift setups

clearly nvidia is the current champ, but whats in store for the future who knows.

all costs aside, i still believe the extra HP from nvidia is beneficial for VR.

show me something to change my mind and ill sell my 980 right now and switch to AMD.
havent been with AMD since they bought ATI from my hometown...ever since downhill, gpu and cpu's.

seriously your comment about judder??? the 390x is rumoured to be same price at titanX...
the 295x2 scores less bench than the 980 stock!??

the 295x2 has a massive increase in specs compared to the 980 but cant perform the same in bench??

sounds a lot like the bulldozer issues...high spec, s-h-i-t performance