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Today we take a look at the new modified, custom card created in a partnership with Overclockers UK called the GALAX GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition'. Gibbo at Overclockers has created another custom card built with a nickel plated heatsink and the I/O plate is also nickel plated, black. The inductors on this GALAX card are housed in high grade containers and are glued to the PCB to help reduce extraneous noise. Gibbo was keen to point out that their custom cards are the only ones to feature Coil Whine Reduction Technology (CWR).
The GALAX GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition' is certainly a looker. They have went down the ‘stealth bomber' route – ensuring there are no distracting stripes, or colourful extras added to the cooler and PCB. If you want to build a mean looking black system, then this is surely a card you will want to shortlist.
| 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 GALAX GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition is overclocked heavily out of the box. The core clock is increased from 1,050mhz to a whopping 1,178mhz. Boost speed is set at 1,329mhz. The GDDR5 memory speeds are running at the reference clock speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective), although this will not be a bottleneck for the hardware.
