INTRODUCTION

   Graphics cards have been the alpha and the omega for gamers all around the world since the mid 90's when the first really "serious" game titles made their appearance on the PC (titles like Mech Warrior, Tomb Raider, Phantasmagoria, Tex Murphy and Wing Commander 3). Back then of course things were a lot simpler compared to now since gamers only had a handful of cards to choose from by manufacturers like NVIDIA (Riva 128/TNT/GeForce), 3DFX (Voodoo), Matrox (Millennium/Mystique) and ATI (3D Rage/Rage Pro) and the one thing everyone cared most was compatibility with games rather than performance (something which continued for many years to come). NVIDIA and ATI/AMD cards have dominated the market for the past 14 years and today in the market gamers can find the 18th line to carry the name GeForce (10th generation GPU) and the 23rd line to carry the name Radeon (if I’m not mistaken) so it's easy to see how much things have advanced compared to back then. We haven't had a graphics card review on NikKTech for a long time but when we were asked to test one of the latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970's to hit the market and more specifically the WindForce 3X OC by GIGABYTE we simply couldn't refuse.

   Founded in 1986, as a small research and development team, GIGABYTE Technology Co. Ltd. has taken a position as one of the industry's top motherboard manufacturers. Lauded for high-performance motherboards and graphics cards, GIGABYTE holds numerous overclocking world records thanks to technical design prowess and innovative patented technology. GIGABYTE further expanded its product portfolio to include laptops and desktop PCs, computer peripherals, datacenter solutions, mobile phones, as well as home entertainment devices to provide a full range of hardware for home and enterprise use.

   The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 is not a new card and has been around for 8 full months but that's obviously not enough to take the spotlight off since it's still one of the best-selling models in the market (fully supports DirectX v12.1, OpenGL v4.5, OpenCL v1.2 and Shader Model v5). It sits right between the GTX 960 and GTX 980 cards (and the new GTX 980Ti) but in reality it's not that much slower compared to the 980 model since it's just a slightly cut-down version of the same 28nm GM204 Maxwell processor but with 1664 shader processors (instead of 2048), 13 streaming multiprocessors (instead of 16) and 104 texture units (instead of 128). Default core and memory clocks are also reduced (something resolved in all OC’ed models) but everything else remains pretty much the same including a ROP count of 64 (only 56 are functional however) and a 256bit memory interface along with a total of 4GB GDDR5 RAM (3.5GB is however usable). The GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 WindForce 3X OC features a different design PCB, custom tri-fan cooling system based on the WindForce 600W and two power connectors (8+6pin) three things that allow it to run the core at a 1114MHz base clock and 1253MHz Boost clock and the memory at 1753MHz (64MHz more over the stock base clock and 75MHz over the stock boost clock). So let’s see what kind of performance you can expect with some of the latest games to hit the market with the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 WindForce 3X OC 4GB.