I've just purchased an ASUS GTX 970 to be the sole GPU in my study PC. I was expecting Cool, Quiet and lots of PPD. Well I can tell you that just one 970 is as noisy as my pair of ASUS 290X's which is a real disappointment. It also seems to produce the same amount of heat too. And PPD seems less than 250K. Maybe I should have gone for a nice cheap second hand 290X off ebay?
Hi. It was the ASUS Strix OC Direct CU 11 edition. I thought that it was supposed to be quiet when running at full tilt. Does anyone out there know of a particularly quiet 970. Also what PPD are to be expected from your average 970? I thought that they were supposed to be mega so I'm a bit disappointed with what I'm getting. Am I supposed to be using old drivers to get it working at full speed? Cheers. Pete
My MSI 970s (Gaming 4G Twin Frozr V 4GB) are by far the best mid range GPU that I have ever owned. Obviously the 980s in my gaming rig are still the benchmark/folding kings, but I cannot believe how powerful, cool and quiet the 970 is for a card in the £250-300 price range. They are currently installed in a dedicated folding rig, sitting at 340K PPD each which I will hopefully remember to post a screenshot of later, and the card fans are inaudible over the case fans in that particular machine. I haven't had it in a workstation to appreciate the feature yet, but they have a zero noise Twin Frozr V cooler which stops the fans when the system is running low GPU demand 2D apps. They are so good that I've upgraded four client machines in the past couple of weeks with them in anticipation of the Star Wars: Battlefront release this week!
I use a number of EVGA GTX 970 SC cards - I find them both power efficient (40W less than my GTX 780's at full load, and a lot more powerful) and quiet (because of the ACX cooling arrangement). But I've not got a 290X, so I can't compare directly to that. In terms of PPD on these cards, I get anywhere between 250k and 340k depending on the project.
Hi Doc. What driver set are you using with your 970's. I think I installed the latest set but have heard that the older ones are better for folding. What would you recommend?
Sorry for not responding earlier work is being a pita. The 970's I have are GeForce GTX 970 "Mini-ITX" 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (GV-N970IXOC-4GD). Good performers with some overlocking and not much noise from them. I get about 230K+ on them, again depending on the work unit. Running these on windows 10 with Nvidia driver 355.82 or newer. Currently hard drive has failed on unit with 2 of these cards so out of production for next few weeks. Prior to this lost internet for about a week. Been going well. lol
What do you mean by "depending on the project"? Can you choose different projects that give you different points. I don't think that I've ever selected anything like that. It just seems to do everything automatically. Also I'm on Windows 10, so is the latest Nvidia driver OK with that? Cheers.
Not all projects are equal - some generate more points than others (despite the apparent benchmarking done by Stanford). You cannot choose the project either - you get whatever Stanford dish out ...
They are factory overclocked (as they are 'SC' versions of the card), so I haven't bothered to try to push them further. (Overclocking GPU's is not as slick in Linux as it is in Windows )
Well now I'm going through some 970 disappointment... One of my MSI cards has started crashing the machine (critical kernel error, code 41 in event viewer) when either folding or gaming. I have identified which card it is and pulled it to get a warranty replacement. Apparently 970s aren't fond of 24/7 MD crunching either!
Scan were doing special offers on Gigabyte hardware the other day, so I decided to try out the gaming G1 970 with the Windforce cooler. I must say that is tremendously quieter than the ASUS card. Just a gentle whoosh of the fans this time, and factory overclocked too. And it was only 20 quid more than the ASUS. So early impressions of the new card are very favourable. Looks like I might well have solved the noise problem and some extra juice to boot. Thanks to everyone for their input. I'll see what PPD we get from this one. Pete
