The underlying GM204 GPU core has much in common with the GTX 980, except here it consumes less power as part of the chip is disabled. NVIDIA has paired 4 GB GDDR5 memory with the GeForce GTX 970, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface.

ASUS GTX 970 DirectCU Mini OC - TechPowerUp ASUS GTX 970 DirectCU Mini OC - TechPowerUp

It’s the fastest GTX 970 we’ve seen out of the box, with a 1,203MHz GPU core clock and 1,355MHz boost clock, as well as memory overclocked to 1,800MHz.The Asus STRIX remains our favourite GTX 970 card, however, and AMD’s top-end cards are still better value.

Asus GeForce STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5 256 Bit Graphics Card, 4

Today, we're reviewing the ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970 OC, a non-reference design, factory-overclocked GTX 970 graphics card with a custom-designed PCB and the company's new STRIX cooling solution, which stops the fans in idle for a completely noiseless experience. The GeForce GTX 970 is carved out of the 28 nm GM204 silicon on which the GTX 980 is based, by disabling three of sixteen streaming multiprocessors with, each, 128 CUDA cores. In practical terms, however, applications see the full 4GB of RAM and the video driver balances out the load.For the graph below, we recorded all GPU clock and GPU voltage combinations of our 1920x1080 resolution benchmarking suite.