Introduction

The GeForce GTX 970 is the smaller brother to NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 980, of which both are based on the Maxwell architecture using the GM204 graphics processor. The GTX 970, much like its predecessors, the GTX 770 and GTX 670, is destined to be an underrated card decking out lower shelves under the GTX 980's shadow. Steam Hardware survey trends would also agree with our guess that this card will end up selling more between the two in volume to probably even fetch NVIDIA more revenue overall.

The GeForce GTX 970 is carved out of the 28 nm GM204 silicon the GTX 980 is based on, by disabling three of sixteen streaming multiprocessors with 128 CUDA cores each. The resulting shader count is 1,664. Texture memory units are, proportionately, down to 104, as are clock speeds, although they stay well above the 1 GHz mark. The ROP count stays at a whopping 64, with a 256-bit memory bus width and a standard memory total of 4 GB.



MSI is one of the leading players on the graphics card market, and their GTX 970 Gaming, reviewed today, has been available since NVIDIA's launch. We previously tested the MSI GTX 980 Gaming, and are today finally taking a look at the GTX 970 Gaming.

MSI's GTX 970 Gaming is a fully customized variant of the GTX 970 with a new dual-fan MSI TwinFrozr cooler and a custom board design with new voltage-regulation circuitry. The card is also overclocked to a base clock of 1114 MHz out of the box.

The card is currently available online for $350, which is a reasonable price as it is in-line with similar offerings.