I want to purchase a GTX970 but I have been putting it off for a while because I noticed they all seem to have glowing and very similar reports about their performance and value. The one big complaint seems to be the coil whine noise that is often reported.
My budget constrains how much I can spend so I decided I will buy the one GTX 970 that will give me value, performance and hopefully, a few good years of service.
So I have read a lot of the online reviews and studied their performance charts and mused over their conclusions about each of the cards.
I realized that performance can be equal by overclocking as they all seem to have the same limits, give or take a few MHz.
However the coil whine noise seems to be the big problem so I puzzled for the past few weeks as to how to judge which card has the least trouble with coil whine.
It finally dawned on me that going through the reviews on Newegg and noting the reports of coil whine for each card would be very helpful.
So I did the following.
I decided to actually evaluate each report of coil whine in the reviews and I categorized them as follows.
I put all the the reports of 'some minor whine once in a while', whined for a few seconds, then stopped and hasn't whined since', etc in the first group.
Then I put all those reports that were severe, that is, genuinely annoying in the second. 'Whined like a jet airplane', 'I could hear it all the time over my game' , 'I could hear it over my fans', etc in the second group.
I did discard one whine coil noise complaint that caused the reviewer to give his card 1 egg.
He was so upset he was returning the card because the whine was so annoying he had to get rid of it. He said it was a terrible noise but he could not hear it WHEN HE TOOK HIS EAR OFF THE CASE!! ( I put his complaint in the NUT group and did not include it.) I also thew out a couple of other similar nuts.
So I searched the reviews for the word WHINE and carefully read each response and I came up with the following.
Note that I only did 5 different cards so far but they were the cards I had already been mulling over based on their being the most popular, etc.
Here is what I found
EVGA 04G-2978-KR GeForce GTX 970 FTW 4GB 3 of 33 9.09%
MSI GTX 970 GAMING 4G GeForce GTX 970 5 of 135 3.7%
ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5 17 of 95 17.89%
MSI GTX 970 4GD5T OC 2 of 20 10%
GIGABYTE GV-N970G1 16 of 120 13.33%
NOTE: The 3 of 33 is the amount of genuinely annoying reports (3) versus the overall reports (33)
I was surprised at the STRIX as I was really leaning towards it based on the online testing reviews over my second choice, the EVGA.
17.89% of the reviewers reported coil whine that was really annoying whereas the MSI GTX 970 GAMING has the least amount of complaints, only 3.7%.
I realize this is not a complete study of all the cards out there and I am going to do some more over the next fews days but, based on this, I am almost certainly going for the MSI GAMING card.
I just want to evaluate some more cards this way and see if I can get the best one on BLACK FRIDAY for good price.
My budget constrains how much I can spend so I decided I will buy the one GTX 970 that will give me value, performance and hopefully, a few good years of service.
So I have read a lot of the online reviews and studied their performance charts and mused over their conclusions about each of the cards.
I realized that performance can be equal by overclocking as they all seem to have the same limits, give or take a few MHz.
However the coil whine noise seems to be the big problem so I puzzled for the past few weeks as to how to judge which card has the least trouble with coil whine.
It finally dawned on me that going through the reviews on Newegg and noting the reports of coil whine for each card would be very helpful.
So I did the following.
I decided to actually evaluate each report of coil whine in the reviews and I categorized them as follows.
I put all the the reports of 'some minor whine once in a while', whined for a few seconds, then stopped and hasn't whined since', etc in the first group.
Then I put all those reports that were severe, that is, genuinely annoying in the second. 'Whined like a jet airplane', 'I could hear it all the time over my game' , 'I could hear it over my fans', etc in the second group.
I did discard one whine coil noise complaint that caused the reviewer to give his card 1 egg.
He was so upset he was returning the card because the whine was so annoying he had to get rid of it. He said it was a terrible noise but he could not hear it WHEN HE TOOK HIS EAR OFF THE CASE!! ( I put his complaint in the NUT group and did not include it.) I also thew out a couple of other similar nuts.
So I searched the reviews for the word WHINE and carefully read each response and I came up with the following.
Note that I only did 5 different cards so far but they were the cards I had already been mulling over based on their being the most popular, etc.
Here is what I found
EVGA 04G-2978-KR GeForce GTX 970 FTW 4GB 3 of 33 9.09%
MSI GTX 970 GAMING 4G GeForce GTX 970 5 of 135 3.7%
ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5 17 of 95 17.89%
MSI GTX 970 4GD5T OC 2 of 20 10%
GIGABYTE GV-N970G1 16 of 120 13.33%
NOTE: The 3 of 33 is the amount of genuinely annoying reports (3) versus the overall reports (33)
I was surprised at the STRIX as I was really leaning towards it based on the online testing reviews over my second choice, the EVGA.
17.89% of the reviewers reported coil whine that was really annoying whereas the MSI GTX 970 GAMING has the least amount of complaints, only 3.7%.
I realize this is not a complete study of all the cards out there and I am going to do some more over the next fews days but, based on this, I am almost certainly going for the MSI GAMING card.
I just want to evaluate some more cards this way and see if I can get the best one on BLACK FRIDAY for good price.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram