Over the past week or so, and into tomorrow, there is a real shift in the graphics market as new parts from AMD launch and existing products receive appropriate price updates. One such card is the GTX 970, a GPU which blitzes 1920×1080 performance and is ideal for 2560×1440 at a reasonable price (£280/$350). Today we test a high spec version in out EVGA GEFORCE GTX 970 Review (SSC Edition).

EVGA GEFORCE GTX 970 Review (SSC Edition) – Box and Bundle

The SSC Edition arrives in a fairly standard EVGA box with a little logo identifying the model. Our box had an extra fold out section with more info on the new cooler which has been installed and inside the box we get a thorough bundle. We get a poster, case badges, stickers, product documentation, power cables and DVI to VGA adapter. NVIDIA also have a bundle running currently which will also get us a copy of Batman: Arkham Knight and some retailers are offering a free backplate too…then rounding things up EVGA offer one of the best overclocking and monitoring tools around.

EVGA GEFORCE GTX 970 Review (SSC Edition) – The Card

 

The SSC Edition (04G-P4-3975-KR) of EVGA’s GTX 970 is shown above and it uses the ACX 2.0+ cooler. It features double ball bearing fans with swept fan blades which have the ability to turn off when the card is at low load (or more specifically below 60c) and mixes aluminium fins with three chunky copper heatpipes. EVGA make the card stand out from the competition by adding in a dual BIOS switch, Memory and Mosfet cooling plate and optimised 6 power phase design which allows up to  33% more power delivery.

On the top edge is the dual bios switch and nearby are two power connectors,  one six pin and one 8pin which help to provide the card with its 150w  (approx). Turning round to the card outputs we see a single DVI being accompanied by three DisplayPort connectors and HDMI. NVIDIA do allow multi-screen configurations to create resolutions such as 5760×1080 across varied output types however the card is very much geared to 4K support (including over HDMI 2.0).

In terms of core configuration the Maxwell GPU used on the GTX 970 features 1664 Cuda Cores with a reference speed of 1190MHz. The GPU boost spec is 1342MHz and our memory configuration is 4GB of GDDR5 (1753MHz) on a 256-bit bus. This is of course a card which supports the latest DirectX as well as the key NVIDIA technologies of PhysX, G-Sync, Gamestream, Dynamic Super Resolution, Voxel Global Illumination, MFAA and 3DVision. GPU compute is also supported as is 7.1 audio over HDMI.

EVGA GEFORCE GTX 970 Review (SSC Edition) – Performance

Testing was performed on the Intel Core i7-5960X running on an X99 board with 16GB of DDR4 and a Samsung 850 Pro SSD. Windows 8.1 was the OS and all games along with the OS were patched.

NVIDIA Driver: 353.30
AMD Driver: 15.6 Beta

EVGA GEFORCE GTX 970 Review (SSC Edition) – Conclusion

The GTX 970 was already an impressive card and in our opinion one which hit a great price point given the performance offered. Anyone wanting to game at 2560×1440, which we really recommend over 1920×1080, would find the card to be a perfect match for those screens without too much of a drop in performance over the more expensive 980.

With their SSC edition of the GTX 970 EVGA have created an exceptional version of the GPU. Dual BIOS allows enthusiasts to really have fun with the card, the enhanced cooler is quiet while also keeping temps well under control and it is good to see EVGA implement a profile which turns off the fans at low temperatures.

As for performance, this is the fastest GTX 970 we have tested, without doubt. It is sitting in a price range with a bunch of cards which are changing daily (290X’s for example, which are the exact same as a 390X, are priced very competitively) however in the majority of our tests the SSC provides higher framerates. A particular highlight was Project Cars however DOTA 2 Reborn showed some exceptional performance too. Our manual overclocking test saw the core hit 1450Mhz (approx) with memory peaking at 2000MHz resulting in 3DMark score of 6004. A very nice increase indeed.

So that brings us to value where the standard bundle from EVGA offers some fun items, the NVIDIA bundle adds Batman Arkham Knight to really enhance value and some retailers offer a free backplate to add further polish. When we then consider that this card has a minimal price increase over a standard 970, we have no issue in giving it our Performance Award. Keep in mind as well that EVGA have some of the best customer support around…