KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The Palit GTX970 Jetstream ships in a plain box with ‘JetStream' highlighted in gold lettering. Its a fairly bland looking box, but as the majority of graphics cards are bought online now, it hardly seems an issue.
The bundle includes literature on the product, along side a power converter cable and video adapter. Palit include a sticker as well.
The Palit GTX970 JetStream is a dual slot, two tone card, based around a black and gold cooler. The PCB is black. Two large fans are set in parallel to deliver cooling to the PCB underneath.
The Palit GTX970 JetStream reflects light a little depending on the angle. The cooler actually feels a little flimsy beside the ASUS Strix and MSI Gaming 4G versions of the GTX970. Partially because the black extension plate on the rear of the PCB moves easily when you apply even modest pressure.
Palit have adopted a different I/O backplate configuration to both MSI and ASUS. Instead of dual DVI and a full sized HDMI and DisplayPort they have opted for 3 x mini DisplayPort connectors and a mini HDMI port.
If you plan on using the DisplayPort connector on your monitor you will need a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort converter. Palit should really have included one of these converters in the box. The same thing applies to the mini HDMI port on the card – you will need a converter cable which is not included in the box.
The Palit GTX970 takes power from two 6 Pin PCIe connectors, shown above – these are placed just before the extension plate at the end of the PCB.
Unfortunately they are rather fiddly to get to as the cables connect in a reverse position – with the plug catch pointing towards the cooler at the front of the card. Removing the power cables is frustrating as you need to get a finger inside to the catch between the fan in front.
This really is rather unnecessary.
The card is fully SLi capable, as shown above.
The Jetstream cooler doesn't look quite as beefy as either the STRIX Direct CU II cooler on the ASUS GTX970, or the Twin Frozr 5 cooler on the MSI GTX970. Three modest sized heatpipes run into aluminum fins on either side of the core.
The GM204 GPU is manufactured on the 28nm process. There are 64 ROPS, 104 Texture units and 1,664 CUDA Cores. The core speed is clocked at 1,152mhz with a turbo boost to 1,279mhz. The 4GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective).
Seems to be a nice card
Especially that it is priced significantly cheaper than other brands.
“you need to buy a full sized HDMI adapter” – when I bought mine early-Jan 2015, it comes with a mini-to-full HDMI adapter in the box.