Nvidia Launches GTX 980 And GTX 970 "Maxwell" Graphics Cards ($549 & $329)

I broke down and upgraded from my 770 to a 980. My g1 gamer arrived and is installed awaiting GTA V. Bring it on Rockstar.
Damn, still 70 days until Jan 15th.

I haven't bothered to overclock anything but the memory yet. It went to 8 ghz with no sweat. I'm looking forward to trying out my 3D vision 2 with it. My 770 was getting crushed by most newer games when running in 3D.
 
My MSI Gold edition 970 has a 73.1% ASIC score. Is that good? I have no idea what ASIC means, what the range might be, how high or low it can go, etc.
 
Yup! There are plenty of guides out there for 970 overclocks, too.
It looks pretty simple on the MSI afterburner. I tried looking a few up, but I didn't find much using that program, so I just set it to 110% power limit with a +50 on the core clock and +100 on the memory clock. Is that a modest enough OC where it should be pretty safe?
 
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I guess this should be consistent with everyone else.

How can it not support the graphics driver though? It's up to date.
 
Anyone got a 970 running at around 1500mhz boost? Not getting the performance I want in DA:I, so I've been slowly bumping the clock on my G1s this evening. Got it at 1470mhz right now and the top card is holding steady at 64-66* C, w/ bottom at 55*, under load. Probably won't go any higher than this, but I'm curious.

Edit: Well, pushed on to 1500 boost. Top card temp only went up to 67* under load. Man, these cards are amazing!
 
What's this about updating the BIOS on MSI cards? I have a MSI Twin Frozr 970 - anything I need to worry about?

Yeah you should update them.

Some MSI cards are having fan issues, either the fans running way too high when they shouldn't be, not running at all when they should be, and some mix in between of both.

To keep safe with your card, I'd definitely recommend you update it even if you haven't noticed this as an issue.
 
Would MFAA help TXAA performance as well, or is it just for MSAA?
If it could be enabled at the same time it might be a good fit for the temporal part of TXAA.
Basically the quality of both TXAA modes would get better, but in terms of speed 2xTXAA would still be the fastest one.
 
My MSI Gold edition 970 has a 73.1% ASIC score. Is that good? I have no idea what ASIC means, what the range might be, how high or low it can go, etc.

Don't care about it.

It looks pretty simple on the MSI afterburner. I tried looking a few up, but I didn't find much using that program, so I just set it to 110% power limit with a +50 on the core clock and +100 on the memory clock. Is that a modest enough OC where it should be pretty safe?

I pushed 150 core and 500 mem on my MSI, and gamed perfectly for hours. So yeah yours should be pretty safe.

4.5GHZ.

Is that normal performance?

Seems about right.

Does resolution affect fire mark score

I think it's fixed in the config and you can't change that.
 
Sat down yesterday and started overclocking my 980. Setled for 1595 MHz GPU and 4110 MHz Mem clock at the end. Did some game benchmarks (Arkham, Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs...) to test stability. Only one that got me worried was GTA 4 which crashed at the end. Turned out it also crashes with no overclock at all.
So everything is prepared for Dragon Age Inquisition. Still have to think about what free game to get.
 
Sat down yesterday and started overclocking my 980. Setled for 1595 MHz GPU and 4110 MHz Mem clock at the end. Did some game benchmarks (Arkham, Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs...) to test stability. Only one that got me worried was GTA 4 which crashed at the end. Turned out it also crashes with no overclock at all.
So everything is prepared for Dragon Age Inquisition. Still have to think about what free game to get.

Damn, that's a ridiculous overclock. Hard to believe that would be stable. You should test some intensive games for longer periods of times than just benchmarks.

Which brand 980 is that?

And if you want to put that GPU through it's paces, pick Assassin's Creed Unity as your free game. It's probably the best looking game ever made at max settings.
 
Damn, that's a ridiculous overclock. Hard to believe that would be stable. You should test some intensive games for longer periods of times than just benchmarks.

Which brand 980 is that?

And if you want to put that GPU through it's paces, pick Assassin's Creed Unity as your free game. It's probably the best looking game ever made at max settings.

Yeah I found that playing games was the best stability test for my overclock. My 970 seemed fine in Heaven and Firestrike but BF4 and Shadow of Mordor would crash out after about 20 minutes. Using these games has allowed me to get a stable setting.

Edit:

I just wanted to check what clock speeds other MSI 970 owners are getting.

As standard my clock shows 1114MHz (the site I bought from stated 1140MHz), but my boost clock is 1316MHz (site stated 1257MHz)

I have been able to add a +200MHz to the clock speed = 1316MHz (with boost 1516MHz) and +410MHz to the memory = 3915MHz

I have a couple of more profiles where I push the memory so it hits 4000MHz but I have settled for the lower one as I wasn't too sure if it was causing issues in a couple of games.


Firestrike (demo version so not sure if this is the same as other benches in this thread):

Score 10201 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970(1x) and Intel Core i5-3570K Processor (@4.2GHz)

Graphics Score: 12839
Physics Score: 7932
Combined Score: 4831
 
Damn, that's a ridiculous overclock. Hard to believe that would be stable. You should test some intensive games for longer periods of times than just benchmarks.

Which brand 980 is that?

And if you want to put that GPU through it's paces, pick Assassin's Creed Unity as your free game. It's probably the best looking game ever made at max settings.

I should add that this is under water. I will try some more games today. Did only a bit Watch Dogs yesterday and I had to put down the overclock a bit, but it was stable after that.
Unigine benchmark was also stable, but I could let it run in a loop for some hours. Is the demo of the Firestrike any good or do you have to buy the full version for it to make any sense?
 
Anyone have experience with Palit's Jetstream 970 GTX? It's only 320€ on amazon and I didn't have any problems with their 660 Ti.
 
Anyone have experience with Palit's Jetstream 970 GTX? It's only 320€ on amazon and I didn't have any problems with their 660 Ti.

I had a Palit 470 GTX with all sorts of problems. Random black screens of death, driver crashes, card running super hot with the fans way up, not to mention loud as a truck. I heard they used cheap PCB materials back then, not sure about now. Wouldn't recommend them.
 
Yeah you should update them.

Some MSI cards are having fan issues, either the fans running way too high when they shouldn't be, not running at all when they should be, and some mix in between of both.

To keep safe with your card, I'd definitely recommend you update it even if you haven't noticed this as an issue.

Thanks for the info. I downloaded MSI Live Update 6 from their website, but it won't start in Win 8.1 for some reason. Anyone know why this might be?
 
Yeah you should update them.

Some MSI cards are having fan issues, either the fans running way too high when they shouldn't be, not running at all when they should be, and some mix in between of both.

To keep safe with your card, I'd definitely recommend you update it even if you haven't noticed this as an issue.

What's the safest way to properly update the cards BIOS? Using MSI Live app it doesn't show that there's a new BIOS for the card.

If I'm not experiencing issues with my card is it still worth updating?
 
What's the safest way to properly update the cards BIOS? Using MSI Live app it doesn't show that there's a new BIOS for the card.

If I'm not experiencing issues with my card is it still worth updating?

There is a thread on MSI forum where you can download the bios and update it yourself.
A quick google search seems to indicate that their forum is under maintenance until the 21st though.
Also if you are 100% sure that your card is not randomly starting up when idling then you don't really have to update it. But I doubt you can actually monitor your card fans all the time.
 
If you have vsync forced, how did you achieve 108 fps? 120hz screen I suppose....?

Mine is the one at 108, his is a lot lower.

I have achieved slightly over 60fps in Heaven's readings on my 60 hertz monitor when I accidentally left the vsync on. That is why I asked.
 
Yeah, I have it forced.

That explains a lot. That limits your framerate to the refreshrate of your monitor. That will greatly impact the results of benchmarks. Vsync is kind of something you want to deal with on a game to game basis any way. Some games don't play well with driver forced vsync options, some others do well with specific driver based settings. I wouldn't globally force it in your driver.
 
I ordered a GTX 970 yesterday and it's out for delivery right now!

Question:

I'm currently using a Radeon HD 5850. What should I do when I install the card? Should I remove the ATI Catalyst Control Center and drivers and then just download and install the new nVidia software?
 
I ordered a GTX 970 yesterday and it's out for delivery right now!

Question:

I'm currently using a Radeon HD 5850. What should I do when I install the card? Should I remove the ATI Catalyst Control Center and drivers and then just download and install the new nVidia software?

1) Remove your current AMD drivers
2) Install your new GPU
3) Install the latest Nvidia drivers

Done.
 
Reference 970 in the wild.

http://i.imgur.com/ag12ByJ.jpg[IMG]

Big claims with coil whine reduction.[/QUOTE]

Bizarre. Haven't other reference cards been released? Aren't reference specs typically identical across manufacturers?

[quote]Coil Whine reduction technology: We specify the capacitors/inductors to be enclosed in plastic containers as it helps reduce/eliminate coil whine[/quote]

Interesting. Does it actually eliminate the whine or do the plastic containers act like some kind of sound proofing?
 
That seems to be closer to what you should expect. It's hard to know if DSR adds some extra overhead and the resolution is very slightly higher than 1920x1080. It's running a little hot, though. Not necessarily alarmingly hot and ambient temps can make a big difference but 77C is higher than I'd expect from one loop of the Heaven benchmark.
 
I really think the card isn't boosting properly. Either it's getting temp throttled or something else is going on. It should be boosting to ~1250mhz and you should have a minimum of 20% more performance than you are getting.

I'd run firestrike with Afterburner running and keep an eye on those graphs and see how much time the card is spending over 75C and how much time the GPU is spending at 99% and what those clocks are.
 
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