Sunday, April 19th 2015
EVGA Gives Away Free Add-on Backplate with its GTX 970 Lineup
Spring is in the air, and to celebrate EVGA is throwing in a FREE backplate for the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC (04G-P4-3975-KR) and EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC (04G-P4-2974-KR) graphics cards at participating ETAIL/RETAIL for a limited time! When purchased at participating locations, the backplate will automatically be included with the purchase, all you need to do is a simple installation. (Instructions included). A backplate acts like a backbone on your card, boosting rigidity by providing extra support to the PCB, protecting critical components, reduces GPU temperatures, and most of all, looks great! Offer ends April 30th.
9 Comments on EVGA Gives Away Free Add-on Backplate with its GTX 970 Lineup
When their 970s were first released, they had no backplate (not to mention bioses that throttled clocks at stock voltage and some with gk204 contact-plate coolers...but I digress). People bitched. EVGA offered a free backplate for a good deal of time after the fact if you signed up for one on their website...which is what I did...still haven't put it on though. I keep wondering if it'll actually help anything. Probably not..I think my limitations are VRM/pcb/etc related (as their initial setup on these cards was pretty pathetic), as it definitely hits some walls no matter what voltage/tdp mods I throw at it. It doesn't suck per se' (it does something like between 1506-1519 stable, which I keep at 1506.5, but the ram is pretty 'bad' at around 7400...essentially what you see in early evga 970 reviews). It makes me wonder if they reused 760 boards, or simply engineered it closer to nvidia's rated tdp...which as we all know with overclocking/overvolting and/or unlocked tdp is complete horse shit.
At any rate, the pcb has changed (at least on FTW and iirc the newer edition of the SSC). It used to be 9.5 inches (the whole reason I bought mine; longer won't fit in my case), now it's something like 10.1 inches, or something to that effect...and does indeed come with an attached backplate. From what I've seen, those cards have typically performed slightly better, more in-line with other companies that over-engineered their boards from the start (even if that only means a few extra mhz and ~8ghz ram that you really don't need for this card...maybe a net of a few percent performance.)
It would make sense if all cards are (slowly) switching to the better setup and that they would pack-in their non-claimed remaining supply of the shorter backplates with some remaining stock of the old cards.
Don't get me wrong, I'm with ya'll...evga totally botched their 970 products (initially, comparatively) in a lot of ways...but whatever. I got a short card, a backplate, and have the ability to fix the throttling issue; I'm happy. Their current cards seem similar to others...so it seems more or less moot to complain at this point.