I picked Combination. Before, I had a HD 7950 3GB, and that card had served me well over the last few years. I really did love how it OC'd. Then, when I upgraded my moitor from 1080 to 1440, The 7950 was beginning to struggle. I was initially going to get a second 7950, but I also noticed I was reaching the max 3GB of my 7950's vram on a few of the newer releases, especially with my new 1440p monitor. So, while I liked the performance increase from the GTX 970, I also was enticed by the extra 1 GB of vram that would give me some breathing space with the newer games....doh! Now, when I am playing at 1440p on games like Shadow of Mordor...The games does have noticeable stutters when using over 3580MB (which is pretty much all the time at this resolution). Had I known the truth, I probably would have kept my HD 7950 for another 6 months and got whatever AMD/Nvidia had to offer in 1H 2015.
Pretty much the same for me,when i went 1440p i upgraded from a 570 gtx(1.2gb) to a 7970 (3gb) the 7970 got replaced with the 970 just over a month ago as it was giving me some issue with blank screen from wake on any driver post 13.12 (something AMD fixed in there Omega super drivers(self tested so it was a driver issue)) as well as it starting to hit the Vram wall. I was hopping the 970 would also give me some breathing space Vram wise @1440p with the view to later going SLI to have access to 2160p via GeDoSaTo/DSR For me i'll be putting the money id have spent on the 2nd 970 away (might see what AMD deliver in 2Q) and staying at 1440p,turning down texture details if needed to self limit to under the now known 3.5Gb driver imposed limit.
I bought mine on initial release based on price to performance ratio illustrated via reviews. Would I still buy one ? Without a doubt.
definitely a combo of both reviews and specs. but the deal breaker was the performance vs price/value which was too good to be true. despite this memory "issue" im happy with my card and the way it performs in games. it's still a beast of a card. also the fact that my HD 7850 started to show signs of being outdated with newer games so it was about the right time to upgrade.
I bought this card cos of the pricing and also because my older cards had died. My 4870 x2 just suddenly died out of the blue which was a replacement for the 5970. At that point i was actually bored of pc gaming and didn't care anyway. then the 4870x2 died so of course i needed a new card. Was nick and tired of amd/ati cards decided to go back to green camp and my last green camp card was the lengendary 8800 gtx. Anyway 970 was great. Wasn't as expensive as either the 4870x2 or 5970 and both those were actually sli cards 2 cards fit into 1 anyway amd it was advertised as a high end card. Was also sick of amd/ati brand and noticed they somehow always seem to perform behind nvidia. Got the cheapest non default form factor of the 970 and was amazed at how easily it can OC even when it's already OC much higher than the default clock speed. Managed to run every new game flawlessly at max settings cos i guess game manufacturers are looking to challenge the 1440p and 400k instead of 1080p so if your running at 1080p res or 1200p it's not a problem. Was actually sick of ati/amd too. The 290 isn't as good i hear and it's older than the gtx900 series.
I really thought "Posted Specifications" would be the hit. So nice to see people being honest here I like that. I do agree with what Darkest posted earlier. For me its like you see this line of people and you ask..why are you in that line? "you didnt hear? get in line!".. a its a cliff.. don't you know why your in line and where its going? " Great card there really is nothing better. AMD is awesome just way to hot and loud for me. Cant go back.. cant make me!
Performance in reviews where the major factor for me. Was a bit skeptical regarding 4GB on 256bit, but it looked better than other options in part of the reviews where the card was pushed beyond 3GB, found it and still find it worth what I paid for it. I did care for it to have 4GB though, and a bit disappointed that 500MB of them are a lot slower than the other 3.5GB. Not quite sure if I would have bought it if I knew that back then, I would most probably still been with my previous card, GTX770 with 4GB.
I got it for $300, and Nvidia has web drivers with optimizations for Mac OS X. AMD options aren't bad, but drivers are based on old kexts with no improvement, and the lower TDP in the 970 is acceptable in my Mac Pro as far as power port configurations go.
I think you need to upgrade that ancient mac pro, i got a couple 2.66 12 core mac pros i need to get rid of :nerd:
I wanted a 4GB card for future proofing that performed great at a fair price, the GTX 970 was the perfect choice.
Price to performance ratio was the big +, can overclock like one bad mofo. Stock reference speed on theses gpu's are what? 1150 mhz, My gigabyte stock clocks are over 1300mhz, I have gotten theses cards to run @ 1600+mhz for quite some time but not really all that stable, one of my card is at 1590 and other is 1560, Very very stable, These cards are probably one of the best purchases I have ever made for a pc hardware in general, Despite the 3.5gb allocation problem, some of my games hit 4gb no problem and it runs great, absolutely great card and price is a real winner, now the 290x price is excellent now too but rather choose 970 because of heat and power consumption, looking fowared to the new 390x,etc. Best gpu purchase I have ever made?? Probably yes, But I still think maybe the 8800gtx was far by the best at that time, the dang card produced over double the performance then its previous cards, the geforce 7, and the first card that I know of to have unified shader architecture, no other card was like that, over double in performance? I would love to see that now. Would be nice to see a 5-6gb version card, card would run much slower at that rate, for me, 5gb would be perfect, 6gb? Card would run kinda slow at that rate, 3 way is defint recommended at that point. Speed wouldn't effect me anyways really, I am all IQ over performance anyday of the year, longs it has playable frame rates, excellent.
Same here. Besides that, I actually needed the upgrade in order to enjoy games that came out arround this time like DA:I, FC4, AC:U, GTAV etc. My 680s simply didn't cut it anymore, due to both 2GB limit vram and gpu horsepower for 1440p. I passed 3.5GB vram on some occasions when I crancked MSAA to 4-8x, but I didn't nothce a performance drop yet. But yeah... this might become a problem in the near future, but I think I'll be just fine with these cards at least for 2015. I'll keep my eyes open for the GM200 MSI Lightnings though, if they ever plan on making them.
The story is like this: - My GTX 470 failed for the first time on December 30 2013 as I was working on the New Years Eve Party playlist. Artifacts and all that, worked a bit for 2 more weeks till it couldn't even boot = black screen. Still worked in Safe Mode but that wouldn't help at all. - I had started thinking I should save money for a equivalent replacement, so 770 4GB was ideal. - By the end of spring I wasn't able to put anything aside and as summer came I would actually not care about the PC. - Summer was crap, rained every day, was even pretty cool, waste of a summer till late August when it was clear Nvidia is coming with a new gen that has 4GB...64 ROPS and will kill anything alive in the GPU world right now ( Aug ). - Put some money aside since summer didn't attract any outside activity, 970 stocks were very limited first weeks but on October 15, payday actually, found 3 Phantom 970 and they were pleasant, cause Asus, Gig didn't fit for sure and also Evga wasn't even close to getting in stocks. - Got the 970, haven't seen a single review, all I knew it's battling 780 Ti and since it had 1 extra gig of ram, made it perfect, thinking how much a 780 Ti costed...970 was expensive enough, almost 1 month of salary. - The other option was to wait for 960 but the rumors with it's late launch and only 2GB RAM made it impossible, as I waited almost 10 months in which I only had a laptop from 2008 that hardly works with Chrome or Firefox, even entering a forum like this was a pain in the butt.
I think you missed an important reason to include in the pool: "efficiency". I already had a powerful card, a GTX 780 but, I sold it to get a GTX 970 because of its performance per watt ratio. I own a six years old PSU and the GTX 970 was a gift from the heaven of power-supplies to my tired Corsair TX 750W. The PSU fan barely ramps up now. The GTX 970 extra memory was just a welcome bonus for me.
