Overclocking a GTX 970 - Do I opt for reference or factory overclocked?

[Bearo]

Hi all,

I'm looking to get myself a pair of shiny new GTX 970's soon. I want to add them to a new build I have planned. This new build will have a custom water cooling loop, and so I want to add two EK water blocks to these two GTX 970's.

I've read there's some potential backwards compatibilities with GTX 670 WB's but after having a dialogue with a EK rep on Facebook recently, he told me they're due to release GTX 970 specific WB (full cover). This is one they're working on at the moment..

What I'm keen to know is, I've read dozens and dozens of reviews recently of all the latest after market GTX 970's from EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte etc and all their factory overclocked versions and how they perform when pushed further with Afterburner or Precision. However, as I'm going to be adding a water block to my 970's does it matter what type of 970 I go for? Will I find it advantageous to get a pair of EVGA FTW 970's or Gigabyte G1 970's at £300 a piece, and then removing their prized and coolers and boosting their pre-overclocked speeds further. OR, do I go for some Reference/non-factory clocked cards (@£230-250 each) and just remove the coolers and OC them with my water blocks on them that way?

Any advice here is appreciated.

 

[BossManFromTheHood]

I wouldn't recommend overclocking the 970s as you don't really need to the performance is there to run future games at 1080p-1440p or even 4K at ultra. There is no point to risk breaking the graphics card and your card making noise and the heat. Be sure to select best answer.

 

[Ellis_D]

One thing to understand about factory overclocked cards (and the big reason why they're non-reference design) is that they're built with much more durable components, have cherry-picked GPUs for best performance, and often use power-delivery methods that deviate from the Nvidia reference (such as a factory overclocked card using one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe power connections whereas the Nvidia would use two 6-pins). Because of this, there are very real benefits for going with a factory overclocked GPU because they allow for much greater overclocking headroom.

As for waterblocks, They are designed to work with the reference PCB and only the reference PCB and would not work with non-reference cards such as the Asus Strix GTX 970 because the actual dimensions of that card are not the same as the reference design. Generic waterblocks usually work (but they are pretty ugly and do not provide cooling to the memory and voltage regulation) and I believe I remember reading a news article about Alphacool trying to make custom waterblocks for the most popular non-reference cards but I'm not sure how far in R&D they are on that.

If you care about keeping up the aesthetics of a watercooling loop. If you care more about performance, I'd go with a factory overclocked card because there have been stellar advances in the air cooling technology they've implemented . the 970 is powerful enough on it's own that you won't need to do excessive overclocking, nor are the reference design cards built so poorly that they would prevent you from doing any overclocking whatsoever. In fact, you should be able to at least get them to what the factory OC'd cards are doing right from the box. At the same time, air coolers are more than capable of keeping these cards cool and are relatively quiet so long as you don't crank up the fans. You can even easily boost their clock even further without fear of them overheating because these custom air coolers are so efficient.

It just depends on what you want more; The better build-quality and guaranteed performance of a factory overclocked card or the versatility of a reference card.

 

[manofchalk]

Your biggest concern really shouls be the PCB's all these cards are using. If their custom designs, then you wont find any water-blocks for them, and a lot of the higher end 3rd partty cards use custom PCB's.

That being said, if you can find a factory overclocked reference board, I would err toward that. It means that chip has been binned higher than the ones running at stock clocks, so its likely you could push it further than you could the other.
However at this point all your doing is improving your odds in the Silicon Lottery, theres no guarantees.

 

[Bearo]

Your biggest concern really shouls be the PCB's all these cards are using. If their custom designs, then you wont find any water-blocks for them, and a lot of the higher end 3rd partty cards use custom PCB's.

That being said, if you can find a factory overclocked reference board, I would err toward that. It means that chip has been binned higher than the ones running at stock clocks, so its likely you could push it further than you could the other.
However at this point all your doing is improving your odds in the Silicon Lottery, theres no guarantees.

Thanks, I was looking at the this ref+factory OC'd option.