Conclusion

Conclusion

There are many GTX 970 card available on the market from a wide variety of brands and that makes choosing more difficult as we have not seen a really bad product out there. All cards tested to date reach give or take the same overclock / noise and heat levels with some offsets here and there of course. GALAX brings a very nice product to the table, with excellent cooling levels I should add. Where the reference cards operate at 80 degrees C you'll notice that this puppy shaves off another 20 Degrees C on average under full load gaming conditions. 

GALAX improved on Nvidia's design, the end result being the EXOC Black Edition series. It comes factory overclocked at a boost frequency of over 1.3 GHz which is impressive all by itself really. Overall, gaming at a monitor resolution up-to 2560x1440 this product will be golden in terms of price versus performance versus a nice quiet product. The 970 rock hard in terms of value for money, and among the 970 cards themselves, this EXOC is one of the fastest clocked cards at default as well.

Maxwell GM 204 GPU experience overall

Both the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 leave a very solid impression. One offers good enough performance, the other exceptional performance within its range. It’s not heaps faster than the aforementioned 780 series though. So I do not expect Geforce 780 range product owners to upgrade anytime soon. However, if you are in say the GeForce GTX 680 range, then this might be a very nice time to jump on-board with a new card. It is interesting to see that 10 years ago performance per generation nearly doubled. With current release schedules we continuously see 20 to 30% performance increases across the board over the last-gen products. That is still respectable as you need to keep in mind that the GM204 is still on 28nm much like Kepler. Injecting more transistors onto a GPU creates yield issues, heat and high power consumption. The GK110 (GTX Titan / Black), whilst being a true beast of a GPU, is testimony to that. With that in mind Nvidia tried to create a product series that is affordable and plays the most high-end and latest games perfectly fine at an acceptable price level. When you look at it from that point of view the Maxwell release is a successful one. This is probably the maximum that Nvidia should and can do on 28nm in terms of improved performance and power consumption versus price.
 

Thermals

The reference design of the GTX 970 and 980 are similar cooling wise. The reference products are set at an offset threshold of 80 degrees C. Once the GPU gets warmer the card will clock down and lower its voltage. GALAX on their end applied a dual-slot dual fan cooler. It's a good performing cooler overall; you can expect the temperature to hover at 60 Degrees C threshold with the games that are harder on the GPU. Remember, that is factory overclocked cooling performance for you. 

Cooling versus noise levels

Cooling wise we can’t complain, noise wise it is a reasonable product. You can hear some airflow, and that's it. That said, there are products out there like the MSI Gaming and the Gigabyte WindForce versions that you can't even hear. So expect sound pressure values in the 41 dBA at best range at max under load and warm circumstances. That's measured 75 CM away from the PC, thus a normal distance in-between you and your PC. At best you can hear airflow from the card while using them heavily. Opposed to the GALAX 980 SOC, the coil whine is much less. All cards will exhibit it a tiny bit, often you can't even hear it. The GALAX does have a notch of coil whine, but it is pretty relative in terms of surrounding environmental noise.  

Performance

A nice advantage for the cards is that they now come standard with 4 GB of DDR5 graphics memory, this means gaming sweetness at even the highest resolutions. All games play perfectly at up-to WHQD at 2560x1440. The GeForce GTX 970 is a nice Full HD to WHQD card that certainly offers a nice chunk of performance in these resolutions. Overall you can play all the modern and latest games with nice AA levels and excellent image quality, the PC gaming way. So that's the 970, I would recommend the GTX 980 with Ultra HD, especially with MFAA (pending a driver release) you'll be able to play games quite well. The GeForce GTX 970 I'd call a very solid WQHD card, e.g. it is great for gaming up-to 2560x1440 and actually truly perfect for Full HD gaming.

Tweaking

Without extra voltage tweaking you can expect a 1350 MHz range for the Turbo clock frequency. Depending on how much your board will take and allow, with voltage tweaking you’ll reach the 1400 MHz range, which as our absolute maximum as well. Variables like your PC stability, power supply and so on are important to any overclock, keep that in mind. The memory is clocked standard at 7.0 GHz, you'll fairly easily achieve 7.5 GHz we settled at 7.8 GHz for complete stability. Overall you’ll see a nice gain in extra gaming performance. 

Final Words

GALAX has a very competitive product in their hands with the EXOC Black Edition. It is among the fastest 970 models you can find on the market and performs as such. Gaming up-to WQHD at 2560x1440 is golden with this card, and includes nice image quality settings. The temperature levels are great, the noise levels can be considered normal, but under load not silent. Combine all that with the fact that this product runs at pretty nice factory clocks with a boost frequency of 1.3 GHz stock then you can't complain, no Sir. As we all know by now, the GeForce GTX 970 series offers intensely good value at roughly 329 USD. The product comes with all the features you'd want, from connectivity for your monitor to the performance cooler to a nice factory overclock and aesthetics. I stated it a couple of times now, but the Maxwell architecture seems very sound and proves it can deliver big-time whilst remaining in line power consumption, heat and noise wise and we can only imagine what it would have been like on 20nm. Overall the product is getting my thumbs up from most viewpoints. The GeForce GTX 970 overall is a rendering freakfest of performance for Full HD and WQHD gaming combined with the best image quality settings. You can find the GALAX EXOC Black Edition in stores as we speak. This model as tested today you can find for roughly 325 EURO (Incl VAT) here in the EU already. Definitely recommended for those on a sharp budget in a game loaded holiday season, hey winter is coming you know.

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