Final Thoughts
Pricing (accurate at the time of writing)
The ASUS GeForce GTX 970 STRIX 4GB graphics card retails for $349.99 at Newegg and the same price at Amazon over in the USA. In the UK Overclockers UK stock the card for £299.99. ASUS provide a 3 year warranty with this product, it is not currently part of any game bundle deals.
Summary
At $350 in the states the ASUS STRIX GTX 970 holds a modest 10% premium over the baseline pricing for the GTX 970. In the UK the pricing is a little more inflated at 20% over the baseline of £250. Whichever way you assess the pricing there’s a good reason to pay more for the ASUS STRIX GTX 970 over a reference style design or even a rival custom cooled design like the EVGA GTX 970 ACX which has been the subject of significant controversy for its cooling solution over the past month. The good reason to pay more is simple: the ASUS STRIX GTX 970 is crazy quiet in any form of loading scenario whilst still managing to maintain sterling temperatures. The passive fan mode, one of the newest trends that ASUS have kick-started in the graphics card market, offers an interesting way to keep your system quieter under light loads. In practice, any game will push the GPU beyond 65 degrees after a short period of time but from our testing if you’re playing an easy to run game with V-Sync enabled you could easily prevent 65 from ever being reached. For example at 1080p this graphics card might smash 250FPS+ in a light game but by enabling V-Sync you could drop that down to 60FPS and cut the GPU workload down to a low enough level to sustain passive operation. Even more pertinent is the role of G-Sync here: if you’re running a 60Hz G-Sync panel your graphics card would do this automatically.
What didn’t we like about the ASUS STRIX GTX 970? Not that much if I’m honest. Aside from the seemingly high UK pricing the only other noteworthy blemish is the fact that ASUS have been too conservative on the out of the box clock speed. Given many consumers still might be afraid of jumping into the world of overclocking I think ASUS would have been wise to match or come near to the clock speeds of rival solutions such as Gigabyte’s G1 Gaming variant and EVGA’s FTW edition. Despite that we’ve seen that the STRIX GTX 970 overclocks like a beast so the lack of “out of the box” speed compared to rival offerings is a mere technicality: overclocking will fix it.
Pros
- Excellent overclocking
- Mind blowing cooling and acoustic performance
- Sleek aesthetics
- User-realistic Display output configuration
- Passive fan mode
Cons
- No support for triple G-Sync monitors, only one DP
- Factory overclock is a little pale compared to rivals
“The latest incarnation of ASUS DirectCU II cooling on the STRIX GTX 970 is probably the best cooling solution on the market for a GTX 970. It strikes up a brilliant balance between temperatures and noise while still offering great performance and overclockability.“
Thank you to ASUS for providing this review sample.
It may be an effective and quiet cooler but it is one butt ugly appendage.
I love how this is not in stock anywhere
None of the 970 are, I’m looking to buy one at the moment but can only find vendors with out of stock or way too expensive ones.
Same problem here
super quiet and cool at 40% fan speed, noisy since 50% xd , kinda huge card, my previous palit 770 with 3 fans is the same length, very efficient card, goes up to 1316mhz on core boost. one webshop told me it’s hard to get these ones, they ordered 20 asuses 3 months ago, but they have got only 8, 6 of them already sold
i wonder how the evga 780 sc would fair up in that benchmark. The evga has a good 10/12 fps boost over vanilla 780’s. couldn’t be far behind they 970’s. My 780 stays very very cool.
i wonder how the evga 780 sc would fair up in that benchmark. The evga
has a good 10/12 fps boost over vanilla 780’s. couldn’t be far behind
they 970’s. My 780 stays very very cool as.
why isn’t anybody telling us about the backplate problem? why everywhere you look search about gtx 970 thay say it’s the coolest? i bought the other day the gtx 970 strix. why? well my 7870 saphire can’t handle games on ultra, it’s an old card that is going hard at it even now, but most of the AA titles require more powerfull gpus so i decided to upgrade. i had to choose between gygabite g1 gaming, msi and asus strix all 970s. i started searching the web for reviews and benchmarks. everywhere they said, that the strix has the less performance but it runs the coolest. so i sayd to myself, ok i will buy the strix because i don’t give a fuck about oc and 10 more fps. i want a card that runs cool. i bought it (300 pounds including delivery) i got the card the other day, swapped my 7870 with the 970 installed everything, entered gta v cranked up all the settings to ultra played for about 10 15 minutes, everything nice and dandy, i opened my cased to touch the gpu, to see how hot it is. guess what, that piece of shit backplate was 100 degrees celsius hot! it acts like a fucking insulator . in gpu tweek it says my gpu runs at 68 degrees but i can tell you that is bullshit, because i can’t touch my backplate for 1 minute because it burns. my 7870 when i play games it gets to 66 degrees and i can keep my hand on it without feeling like i’m getting burned. i am not a fanboy! i just told you my story ! do whatever the fuck you wanna do ! but keep in mind: buy from a retailer who has a good customer service so if what i said happens to you, you can return the card and get a refund. when you buy it be careful to open the box and not to damage it. buy it->test it-> touch it-> if it feels ok to you keep it if not->return it! again i am not a fanboy, i am trying to help others! i searched the web and everybody speaks about the good things nobody says anything about the shitty things! search on google: asus strix 970 backplate hot and you will see.my advice don’t buy it! get another card g1 gaming 970 or i don;t know