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Our review sample didn't arrive in a full retail box, so we can not comment on any extras included. I do like the appearance of the GALAX GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition' – it reminded me a little of the excellent Asus GTX970 STRIX OC which we reviewed back in September, although the Asus card is slightly more colourful, featuring red stickers on the fans.
If James Hetfield in Metallica was building a PC we would imagine he would be using a GALAX GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition'.
Bonus points to the company for installing a full backplate, which is branded with the ‘GALAX' name. A GPU backplate can not only help reduce PCB temperatures, but they offer a little protection to the delicate circuitry underneath.
As we would expect, SLI is fully supported. I do hope Nvidia move to ‘bridgeless SLi' at a future date, negating the need for ugly bridge cables.
The card takes power from a single 8 pin and a 6 pin power connector. Most of the GTX970's we have tested so far require two 6 pin power connectors, so it will be interesting to see if the additional power draw capabilities help improve overclocking later. Regular readers may remember the Asus GTX970 Strix OC takes power from a single 8 pin power connector.
This particular card is equipped with a DVI-I and DVI-D port, a full sized DisplayPort and HDMI connector. This HDMI port will handle 4K resolutions at up to 60hz.
The cooler has a nickel coated base, running into four thick nickel plated heatpipes. OCUK have worked to reduce coil whine by housing the inductors in higher quality containers. They are adhered to the PCB with red glue – this is easily visible in the high resolution board pictures on the next page of the review.
An overview of the GALAX GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition' shown above. The GM204 GPU core is built on the 28nm process. It has 64 ROP’s, 104 Texture units and 1664 CUDA cores. The 4GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. The core runs at 1,1178mhz with a Turbo Boost set at 1,329mhz. The memory is clocked at 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective).
Please, for the love of god, change the overclocking page. The boost clock in GPU-z is misleading, either take it from Afterburner sensors, or open the Sensors tab in GPU-z to show the real boost clock.
Really :-S
“the only card in the world with coil whine reduction tech” …
i bought a Club3D R9 280 card about 4 months ago that already has coil whine reduction technology !
When are the 8gb 970/980 cards releasing? With the current dev process games are requiring high vram due to the console shared RAM, and I only see this getting worse – so future proofing with 8gb seems like the smartest move at the moment.
That’s like a stupid movement at the moment. By the time any game will fully utilize 8GB of VRAM, the entire card will become worthless. IMO it will take another year or two at least, before we see a PC game requiring 8GB of VRAM. And by then GDDR5 will become obsolete. HBM is right around the corner.
I would have said exactly that 6 months ago. But then I played shadow of mordor on a 4gb card… And let’s face it, AMD aren’t competing at the moment, so going for one of their 6gb cards isn’t a great option either.
Silent ‘Infinity Black Edition’??? WTF!? the correct neme is GTX 970 EXOC Black Edition
Just ordered mine….Wasn’t called the infinity though.
Zardon: You dont mention in the test, if it uses nvidia reference mounting holes for the GPU cooler. So does it?
As I wanted to smack an RAIJINTEK Morpheus GPU cooler on it.
That’s the wrong card. Your looking at this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-006-GX&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1010
when you need to be looking at this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-010-GX
Did you order the wrong card?
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-006-GX&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1010
It’s this one:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-010-GX
It’s mentioned in regards to the 970 and the coil whine issues it’s been found to sometimes suffer from.
I ws being a doofus.
I meant I didn’t order the infinity.
I ordered the EXOC black edition.
The infinity was £50 more for only a slight increase in overclock….
ALthough found out today that the infinity is dropping it’s price this week….dammit. lol.
No guarantee there will be an 8GB version. I wouldn’t wait for something that might never appear.
4GB is gonna be fine for the next few years or so.
Only game I know that claimed to use more was Mordor…and that runs fine on 4GB vram with no apparent loss to quality.
Did you notice a difference? 4GB worked fine for me…ran like silk and looked good with the texture pack.
Mind you it looked great on 3GB as well…ddn’t notice any difference.
Yeah…its’ called super glue lol
aaaaaahhhh OMG OMG!!! I can’t believe, I don’t know there is a modded version of black edition, f*ck I have buy the card from Germany and if I was aware of this version I would have bought from you in England.
Shame as it’s not just a clock increase.
That’s a pity when you look at the additional changes made it’s worth a few quid more. Still I’m sure the regular black edition is a pretty good card.
“Although found out today that the infinity is dropping it’s price this week”
where did you get that info from and how much?
cheers
Yes. It plays OK on 3/4GB cards that I’ve seen, but you get big drops and stuttering. The annoying thing is that the textures don’t seem to actually make much of a difference to the aesthetics.
FYI: http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-to-reveal-geforce-gtx-970980-with-8gb-of-memory-in-november-of-december/
It looks pretty much certain, and the reveal should be about now, I was just wondering whether I’d missed it really. I would like for 4GB to be fine for the next few years but looking at the current releases I’m not sure I believe it.
This is all assuming 1080p too – you absolutely need more than 4gb for 4k; even Watchdogs uses more on the lowest settings. Right now, SoM recommends 6GB VRAM and you need at least 4GB to be assured of no stuttering, and CoD: AW recommends 4GB, the Evil Within recommends 4GB, while you absolutely need 4GB for Unity all for 1080p. This is not a few years into the future, it is now. And we’re not talking about buying low end cards here: if you’re buying the best card on the market, or at least one of the most expensive (a 980), there’s no way you should be only just hitting the ‘recommended’ specs, or even below them, when you buy.
No… It also has some superglue on the coils and is black.
It was on the overclockers forums from the designer of the card…
We are taking about this one with a pre-order price of £299.99, due out Friday http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-010-GX&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1010 ?
That isn’t all that was done, Yes glue was used as a buffer between the inductors and pcb to reduce vibration but the components themselves were changed as well.
Yeah…I know.
As I said above it was an extra £50 from the card I ordered…
I did make a mistake in my comment, I thought the price was dropping on the Infinity…but the price on the card I ordered went up.
Wasn’t worth the extra money for me.
.
Especially if the rumours of an upcoming 8GB version are true.
I was joking…but it isn’t worth the price difference. My card (the EXOC black edition) is overclocked to 1500 mhz and still runs under 60 degrees…. hardly any coil whine either.
.
All black does look a bit better.
So glad I went with this relatively unknown brand.
Can you comment at all on the fact that they have one fan still running at idle as opposed to MSI/ASUS having theirs completely turned off? I thought this card looked flawless until I read that part – someone on the OcUK website actually commented that the fan won’t go below 30% which is apparently around 1100rpm
It isn’t misleading.
Then obviously, you got no clue what you’re talking about, in which case, you shouldn’t comment.
How is it misleading then? It’s the correct boost clock because it’s the same one on the manufacturer website. Are you trying to tell me you know better than the manufacturer?
As I wrote, you got no clue then. The boost clock that GPU-z is showing is not correct. I have the MSI variant of this card, and in that tab, it is showing 1403Mhz, but the actual boost clock is 1510Mhz, which is read trough the sensor tab and MSI Afterburner.
The boost clock showing up, is just a guestimate the program is doing, which is clearly wrong.