Well, Earlier this week, I have bought this card here.
MSI GTX 970 4GD5T Armor Edition
Very Simple Unboxing, but comes with the following stuff:
- GTX 970 MSI Armor 4GD5T
- DVI / VGA Adapter - Usual stuff
- Instruction Manual - A LOT of languages.
- Driver Disc with MSI Afterburner
Now again the bad thing is the lack of Molex Power adapters. Frankly speaking though, if you're powering such a rig, then you should have a decent power supply for this.
The Good: MSI encourages you to download the latest stuff, as printed on the CD. There's MSI Afterburner, but I use EVGA Precision X16.
Now taking a look at the card, the fan propeller designs remind me a lot of the MSI GTX 680 Lightning Edition card and some of the older Twin Frozr III Edition Cards. It'll still be better than a reference blower style cooler and since the Maxwell Architecture is heavily concentrated on Efficiency and power more than Kepler GK 104 and 110, this will be fine for what it's needed.
The Good: The GPU can take the heat better than the Palit Card can, and it's pretty quiet.
The Bad: It takes a LONG while to cool down itself on SLI, so airflow is needed.
But once it cools down, the MSI Armor Edition Card idles itself at as low as 28 Degrees Celsius, impressive still.
Inputs and Outputs:
Now from the picture below, THIS is the IDEAL I/O that should remain standard for foreseeable years to come. It has two DVI (DVI-D and DVI-I), HDMI and Display Port. These same four ports were present on my last card the Zotac GTX 780 AMP! Edition GPU. Many people still are not using mini Display Ports as their main ports for their monitor. However if you're going 4K, then you'll utilize the Display Port later.
Below the MSI Card is the I/O for the Palit Card which has a mini HDMI Port, another DVI Port that supports Analog, and 3 mini Display Ports. They left completely the bottom slot blank as a way to ventilate air.
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| The MSI GTX 970 MSI Armor Edition's DVIs being populated. |
GTX 970 SLI TESTING:
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| Palit and MSI GTX 970s in SLI. Quite a weird combination. |
Core i7 2600K @ 4.5 GHZ
Corsair H70
Corsair Vengeance 12 GB RAM
Corsair RM1000
ASUS P8P67M-PRO
Fractal Design Define R3
GTX 970 #1: MSI GTX 970 4GD5T Armor Edition
GTX 970 #2: Palit GTX 970 Blower Card
128 GB SSD OCZ Vertex 4, 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Blue, 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green
Now this rig is powered by this. Now I have to tell you right off the bat, I didn't experience too ideal the scaling. Now the biggest possibility is that I'm being held back by the PCI-E 2.0 Based Sandy Bridge System and motherboard, and maybe using Windows 7 rather than 8.1 which will limit the memory bandwidth. And of course the board being micro ATX, I'm cramping both cards in that limits the amount of air flow that I can get to the top card. Ideally the bottom card should be at the bottom. However, there was a reason why I put the top card as my primary driver.
Now initially, with the Palit Card, after fitting in my new power supply, I found I was facing some glitches in some applications, such as Metro Last Light Benchmark (especially in Super Sampling added benchmarks) while I try to benchmark, as well as freezing after idling for 20 minutes. Now as soon as I put my MSI card in as my primary card, all these problems disappear, Could be a card problem for all I know. After SLI, the Palit could still be utilized.
In the system, the MSI Card does sag quite a fair bit at the Power connector side, so if you look closely, I place a large trouser button at the bottom right edge between the two GPUs to increase a bit of air flow since it's installed so close together with the ASUS P8P67M-Pro slot layout posing a problem to allow fresh air on the top card.
That said, the performance rates has dramatically improved nonetheless. But I definitely need a Christmas gift of an Core i7 5820K and a full ATX X99 platform after spending 950 SGD on a pair of Graphics cards. Because I am really gonna need it for ProTools which is FINALLY supported on Windows.
Scores to follow later......
CALL OF DUTY: Advance Warfare
The game has received a few patches, and it does seem to work well with SLI now. With it, I was actually able to turn everything to the Maximum, and added a serious 4 times Super Sampling, it's a bit choppy, probably because the 2 cards doesn't have enough memory to utilize it. However it was still able to maintain 50-60 average.
OVERCLOCKING AND TUNING
Playing around with clocks is as always quite a bit of fun to mess with as an experienced Overclocker. EVGA PrecisionX 16 is my tool of choice. You can tweak the cards individually to get the optimal setting you want; simply by unlinking their tweaks on EVGA's precision. It's also allows to get both cards to the same clocks but I don't need that. Here's what I come up with.
Every Card was given a +180 to the Core and +100 to the GDDR5, 100% stable.
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| Before and After Adding Overclocks. Initially the Overclock was set at each card + 163 MHz on Core and 50 at clock, And after some tweaks, this new 180 MHz Core and 100 on Memory was what it took to consistently give me this. |
5760 x 1080 TESTING:
Heaven Benchmark 4.0
This was a heavy, I mean a VERY Heavy stress test for the GPUs even when overclocked. It was basically Extreme HD Preset at 5760 x 1080 rather than 1600 x 900 (which those GPUs can sweep this resolution without breaking a sweat). As the frame rate tanks VERY heavily, the 2nd change was turning down Anti Aliasing to 4x from 8x. The result was:
Average FPS: 42.6
Minimum FPS: 7.6
Maximum FPS: 119.7
Score: 1072
Valley Benchmark
I have to say, Valley Benchmark really does look beautiful on 5760 x 1080. The Benchmark was run at the maximum settings possible. Nothing was turned down in any way. Still, we still get pretty playable frame rates
FPS: 33.8
Score 1415
Minimum: 11.1
Maximum: 86.3
EFFICIENCY:
May I also like to point out, despite this heavy stress test, if you can look closely at the Heaven Benchmark Photograph, that even with the increased load, it was STILL not enough to turn the PSU fan on! I tried with FurMark, Same story. Bear in mind, it takes the PSU 40% load to turn on its fan, with that said, I could safely deduce that OC 970s and an OC Core i7 2600K are pulling less than 400 Watts from the wall, which is crazy! In all honesty, I wasn't even expecting that low of a consumption on these Maxwells. Some reviews I checked, the Power Consumption calculated, match the power consumption of a SINGLE R9 290X/290. I know I said this before so many times, but I always loved to re-iterate this fact as AMD better do something with this!
PRICE to PERFORMANCE:
I know I did spend almost 950 SGD (Almost a Grand) on Graphics Cards, (Actually 600 after deducting from the sale of GTX 780). Having said that though, safe to say, the cost of a single card is very nice; the price and what you get for two is even sweeter. It's only about 100 bucks more than a standard GTX 980 and with many of the higher end models, even including the higher tiered of GTX 780 Tis and the R9 290Xes (Especially those from ASUS and Gigabyte) costing more than the 2 GTX 970s I spent for. The GTX 980 is still priced fairly, at least still better than the GTX 780 Ti, taking into consideration power and heat efficiency. And for the performance matching the Titan Z, and beats handily a 295 X2, those cost considerably more. Gotta applaud nVidia's Maxwell for this one!
CONCLUSION:
This configuration is 4K ready, even at least in surround 5760 x 1080. 1920 x 1080p is overkill unless you're running on extreme super sampling tweaks on it. I didn't really get the ideal scaling that I wanted but this will have to do and it works otherwise pretty well. The only thing that will give me the best memory bandwidth utilization is going to a more updated platform and on a full size ATX Board.
My Christmas wish - a Core i7 5820K with a good ATX X-99 based motherboard and a better cooling rad! My two cards are really cramped especially the MSI Armor GTX 970 like a can of sardines in em'!
