Gigabyte G1 Gaming Edition GTX 970

[little P]

Well, everything is now installed and... wow.

This card eats up everything and anything I've thrown at it so far.

A good example is running Assetto Corsa at absolute maximum graphical settings. Every slider is up as far as it can go and everything enabled that can be. Running at 2715 x 1527 @60Hz resolution and it does not ever dip below 60fps.

Amazing.

Every game I have just looks infinitely better and best of all runs smooth as silk, the new 27" monitor looks great too, really pleased with that too

I can't believe how good everything looks, especially AC, Alien Isolation is now cured of the jaggies that nobody could get rid of by running DSR along with conventional anti aliasing. It looks like a different game. The Alien is even more terrifying now

Tomb raider just looks absolutely beautiful at this resolution and I can even have Tress FX on and not dip below 60fps.

Elite Dangerous is just jaw droppingly gorgeous.

I have overclocked it and it's running stable at 1569Mhz (!) with temps maxing out at 62 degrees. That is just insane performance.

With the overclock I'm now getting £1000 performance from a £300 card. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I must make one important point though, this card is BIG.

After much head scratching and cups of tea, I decided I wasn't going to be beaten and set about *ahem* adjusting the inside of my case with a junior hacksaw and some pliers. Suffice to say, I got it to fit eventually... I will not be beaten :lol:

Just bear that in mind if you are thinking of getting one of these.

I do love the LED logo, and it is fully customizable via Geforce Experience. It can even light up in time to the music playing on your PC if you're into that kind of thing but I've just got mine as a subtle "breathing" effect. I must admit, I didn't think I'd be that interested in this feature, but it does look cool at night... :icon_cool:

Some pics;

Today's goodies to install


Amazed at how much dust had built up in a year... :icon_eek:


Extra RAM in and yes, I actually had to hacksaw the case to fit this GPU in. It's not a small case either


Cleaning process completed using some compressed air and cotton buds... looking much better. The airflow will be much improved now


All done, looking good

 

[Kenadian]

Looks awesome man, congrats

Is it just me or is the fan on the wrong side of your CPU Cooler? Shouldn't it be blowing cool air in from the front of the case, through the heatsink fins and out the back?

 

[little P]

Thanks buds.

I thought that very same thing when I was building this PC. I have it mounted as per the instructions though, the Evo Cooler can have two fans either side, but due to the placement of the RAM I can't do that. Not that I need to anyway, it stays nice and cool in there, even more so now the dust isn't restricting the intakes...

Only thing now is to wait for the Oculus Rift to be released and I'll be in Gaming heaven!

Seriously impressed with the capability for overclocking this card has. Nvidia really stepped it up with the 900 series cards.

 

[JohnnyK]

Congrats!

What's with the odd resolution?

And which monitor did you get?

 

[little P]

Thanks JK, it's the DSR feature, basically 2x native resolution. 4x looks great but is a big performance hit, it's basically 4k downsampled to a 1080p monitor. I find 2x with a nice bit of AA looks great and performs really well. You can run any value of DSR you wish though, 3x, 1.5x etc. etc. After a lot of testing though I've settled for the 2x and AA set fairly high.

I went for a 27" AOC 1080p (a bigger screen was the main reason for the change), because with the DSR feature working so well I didn't see the point in forking out for a 4k monitor as I'm going to be using the Rift more than anything in the near future. It got really good reviews though for it's image quality and response time and I'm really pleased with it so far. Makes a massive difference having a bigger screen to chill out in front of.

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/monitors/1295143/aoc-e2752vq