Colorful iGame GTX 970 4 GB Review

Name: Colorful iGame GTX 970 4 GB
Brand: Colorful

W1zzard

on Dec 3rd, 2014,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Colorful

(21 Comments) »

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 same 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.

While Colorful might not be a well-known name to many gamers in the West, they are a big player in the Asia-Pacific markets, with their strongest foothold in China where they sell a ton of cards to DIY system builders.

Their iGame GTX 970 is a highly overclocked version of the GTX 970 with a large triple-fan cooler that should provide excellent temperatures.

I couldn't find a USD price for the card, so I assumed its price point to be $350, which is in line with other custom GTX 970 offerings.

GTX 970 Market Segment Analysis
	Radeon R9 280X	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	GeForce GTX 970	Colorful GTX 970	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon HD 7990	GeForce GTX Titan	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 980
Shader Units	2048	1536	2304	2560	1664	1664	2816	2x 2048	2688	2880	2048
ROPs	32	32	48	64	64	64	64	2x 32	48	48	64
Graphics Processor	Tahiti	GK104	GK110	Hawaii	GM204	GM204	Hawaii	2x Tahiti	GK110	GK110	GM204
Transistors	4310M	3500M	7100M	6200M	5200M	5200M	6200M	2x 4310M	7100M	7100M	5200M
Memory Size	3072 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	2x 3072 MB	6144 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	384 bit	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	256 bit	256 bit	512 bit	2x 384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1000 MHz	1006 MHz+	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1051 MHz+	1203 MHz+	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	837 MHz+	876 MHz+	1126 MHz+
Memory Clock	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz
Price	$205	$340	$350	$230	$330	$350	$310	$410	$1000	$400	$550

Packaging

Package Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + documentation
2x PCIe power cable
Screwdriver kit
Cotton gloves
DVI adapter
Additional heatsink

The Card

Colorful's card uses a red and black color theme that looks nice because the colors used aren't glossy. You will also find a thick backplate on its back. Dimensions of the card are 29.0 cm x 13.0 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card. With three DP outputs, you can build yourself a triple-monitor G-Sync-surround setup with only a single card!

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.

You may combine up to three GTX 970 cards in a multi-GPU SLI configuration. AMD recently switched to transferring CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus in order to handle 4K frames. NVIDIA's SLI suffers from no such limitations, so there is no reason for NVIDIA to use PCIe.