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In the second of our GTX970 launch articles today, we look at the new ASUS version of the card – the GTX970 STRIX OC. As the name would suggest it ships in an overclocked state with a proprietary cooling system and a hybrid fan system to drop noise levels to a minimum.
The Asus GTX970 Strix OC is a mean looking card – the artwork is intentionally minimalistic, fitting in with the theme. Asus say the name STRIX is taken from the ancient Roman and Greek for the word ‘OWL'. Bird lovers all over the world will be happy.
Even though we have a handful of reviews ready for the launch today, Nvidia's Maxwell architecture deserves a little discussion before we get into testing the ASUS GTX970. If you are a regular reader of KitGuru then you will already have studied our multiple analysis of the lower level GTX750Ti solution throughout the year.
The GTX750ti has been one of the most exciting cards that Nvidia have released in recent years – performance is close to the HD7850 while consuming half the power at the socket – and all without the need for a PCIe power cable. It produces such a modest heat emission that the Asus GTX750Ti Strix OC we reviewed recently didn't need to spin the fans most of the time, even when gaming.
AMD really are so far behind now when it comes to power consumption that they will need to release a new architecture to compete. Not an easy thing to do overnight, but we hope they have something in the pipeline to become competitive again in the coming months.
The Maxwell architecture has been designed to deliver twice the performance per watt of previous generation Geforce hardware. It sounds easy enough on paper, but the real world challenges for Nvidia have been complex.
| GPU | GeForce GTX 680 (Kepler) | GeForce GTX 980 (Maxwell) | Geforce GTX 970 (Maxwell) |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 8 | 16 | 13 |
| CUDA Cores | 1536 | 2048 | 1664 |
| Base Clock | 1006 mhz | 1126 mhz | 1050 mhz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1058 mhz | 1216 mhz | 1178 mhz |
| Total Video memory | 2GB | 4GB | 4GB |
| Texel fill-rate | 129 Gigatexels/Sec | 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec |
| Memory Clock | 6000 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 192 GB/sec | 224 GB/sec | 224 GB/s |
| ROPs | 32 | 64 | 64 |
| Manufacturing Process | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
| TDP | 195 watts | 165 watts | 145 watts |
The new GM204 GPU is very efficient. The Maxwell SM has been rebalanced so that the CUDA cores are fully utilised more often. Doing so saves power and enhances overall performance. The L2 cache size in the GM204 is 2MB, or four times larger than the GK104. The addition of extra cache means that fewer requests to the GPU memory are needed – again reducing power consumption and pushing more performance.
The Geforce GTX 970 is equipped with 7Gbps memory. Those of you with higher resolution monitors, or running in a multi screen configuration will also be pleased to hear that there is 4GB of GDDR5 memory on the card, not 3GB – this memory will push 224 GB/s sec. Nvidia have added a new compression engine to reduce the demand on DRAM bandwidth.
The Asus GTX970 Strix OC has received a core clock enhancement to 1,114mhz, from 1,050mhz on the reference design. The GDDR5 memory remains untouched, as we would expect – its certainly not going to be a bottleneck.
