Fresh from the Far East reaches us Colorful's GTX 970 iGame, the latest addition to the company's lineup of graphics cards. While not well-known to gamers from the US or Europe, Colorful is a big player on Asia's hardware markets. The Colorful iGame GTX 970, highly overclocked out of the box with a base clock frequency of 1203 MHz, is one of the fastest GTX 970s available today. This overclock out of the box nets it a 7% performance advantage over the reference GTX 970, which makes the card faster than both the GTX 780 Ti and R9 290X. The performance difference to the more expensive GTX 980 is also just 8%. I only wish Colorful had overclocked the memory chips as well since they can certainly take it, as our manual overclocking tests show.
Colorful engineered a powerful triple-fan, six-heatpipe, dual-slot cooler for their card, and it delivers excellent temperatures and keeps the card stable at high clocks. We are also seeing outstanding overclocking potential that beats all other GTX 970 cards we have tested thus far. Especially memory overclocks are higher than on any other card we've reviewed to date; while the memory heatsink may help with that, such might also just be due to luck of the draw. The cooler is unfortunately noisier than competing cards from MSI or ASUS, for example. Both of those cards shut their fans off in idle or with light loads. The Colorful GTX 970 is quiet in idle, but it could certainly be quieter. During gaming, noise levels are very acceptable when compared to competing non-Maxwell cards, but the card falls short when compared to the best GTX 970s as it ends up a good deal noisier in the comparison.
Power consumption is good and in line with other efficient GTX 970 cards; unlike with the EVGA GTX 970, there are no unexpected surprises here. Colorful also placed a dual-BIOS which doesn't do much aside from providing a safety net in case something goes wrong during a BIOS flash on their card. I see no usage scenario for the GTX 970's reference-clocked BIOS as it's much slower, draws just about as much power, results in as much fan noise and the same temperatures. A low-noise BIOS that runs the card significantly warmer, maybe even at up to the NVIDIA temperature limit, but with far less noise would have been a much better implementation in my opinion. I understand that low-noise output isn't yet a big selling point in APAC markets, but you had better get ahead of the game instead of following it.
As for monitor connectivity, Colorful does as NVIDIA has with their reference design, which is good as there are three DisplayPort connectors for a G-Sync surround setup; and the card's options are generally much better than the usual 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DP combination we've seen on many others.
One of the major drawbacks of any Colorful product is certainly availability. As far as I know, their cards are not sold in the US or Europe, but I hear Colorful is talking to Newegg about getting their cards listed in 2015.
With a price of (estimated) $350, the Colorful iGame GTX 970 is priced fairly, having a price premium of $20 over the reference design. If its price ends up much higher, though, competing GTX 970s would be a better deal.