Customer Ratings & Reviews

I recently got an older Mac Pro and wanted to upgrade everything. I upgraded the CPU to the Xeon W3680, Memory to 16GB, Intel SSD and this GTX 970. I wanted the reference card as I feel this is best looking cooler on the market if not ever. Makes the other brands look chintzy in comparison. Overall the system is super crisp in OS X and Windows 7. This card is an awesome upgrade over the GTX 660 i had in here before and all my games run flawlessly. Who said you can't play games on a Mac? I beg to differ with results, not opinions.

I specifically purchased this GPU for my gaming pc and have it in my MSI GD-65 MB and it runs flawlessly and the TDP is nominal. Battlefield 4, Batman AK and even Star Wars Battlefront Beta testing don't slow it down one bit. Absolutely love this card!

As all expensive computer hardware, the more expensive the better. C: Best card on the market at the moment.

I didn't just buy one, I picked up two for SLI this is the way to go. Easy to install with no problems.

Basically installs it self. Drops to 80 FPS every now and again but for the most part it stays about 150-180 FPS. Only about 3 of the 4 gigs of RAM. If you want a GPU for every day mid-high level gaming this one is the one for you. 100% Satisfied .......

This graphics card is amazing. It is easily the best one I've ever owned. A+

The Nvidia GeForce gtx 970 is a great performing graphics card. I am not personally a fan of the blower style fan coolers as is on this card, but this gpu is in my wife's pc and she does not overclock her gear like I do. I have oc'ed this gpu and it showed admirable overclocks while maintaining tolerable temperatures.

I love the GTX970, 2 of them with the right rig makes good for VR readiness....haven't had any issues with either of my cards, definitely recommend this to other customers, not too expensive, not TOP OF THE LINE or anything, but they are more than sufficient for a great gaming experience.

I am usually partial to buying EVGA products, however at launch of the 970's, nobody was selling(still aren't# the GTX 970 with the reference Titan Cooler. This was the selling point to me, as it is extremely aesthetically pleasing compared to all these generic plastic coolers on cards today. Nvidia carries a 3 Year warranty for the Original purchaser, so as good as EVGA's offering#just no step up option). The 2x 970 I purchased replaced my aging EVGA GTX 670 FTW cards. Even at default clocks as expected these cards thrashed my 670's. The extra 2GB made a nice impact in games like Shadow Of Mordor, where the game wanted way more than 2GB. Both my cards have been decent overclockers, however I usually don't even both, as 2x of these can max out anything on the market at 1440P and *most* games at 4K.. I simply couldn't be more happy. Astounding performance! The only downfall to these cards, and everyone has heard about it by now, is the 3.5GB & 512MB slow partition of VRAM on these cards. When the issue was first discovered it was very evident something was wrong. Since all that however, the latest Nvidia drivers seem to allow full access to the 4GB of VRAM with next to no performance impact, which I will first hand vouch for to be true. If you are in the market for a GTX 970, and don't mind spending the extra little bit of cash, the Reference Nvidia GTX 970 is one hec of a card with the best aesthetics in my humble opinion. For gaming up to 1440P, even a single card should prove to be ample enough power for all your needs.

Don't be fooled by the stock clock speeds. GPU Boost 2.0 increases the clock up to 1253MHz. I don't recommend overclocking unless you are familiar with it, have ample cooling and know what the risks are. My preference in minimum run time for a torture test is 4 hours. With a core overclock of +197MHz (1450MHz Boost) and memory overclock of 496MHz (8001MHz), it passed the torture test with flying colors. Yes this card gets hotter than non-reference cooled cards and no it isn't factory overclocked, but the NVIDIA reference cooler is of such quality that no other manufacturer can compare. Full aluminium cooler with "GEFORCE GTX" logo on the top that lights up green and can be controlled through NVIDIAs GeForce Experience. The quality of the cooler is just beautiful. There is a saying that you get what you pay for, but in this case you get much much more. To settle the issues surrounding the claims of the GTX 970 not having the full 4096MB (4GB) of GDDR5 memory is incorrect. There IS 4096MB available. There are however 2 memory partitions, 3584MB (3.5GB) and 512MB. The first 3.5GB runs at the rated 7010MHz while the remaining 512MB runs much slower at 1/7 the speed, or 1001MHz. This will lead to a noticeable decrease in performance when accessing the last 512MB of memory, but it will only affect those running 4K screens and during heavy benchmarking. Regardless, BUY THIS CARD BEFORE THEY'RE GONE!!!!!!!

I've owned quite a few video cards in my day - many of them being Radeon cards. I've generally liked the price to performance of ATI/AMD over the years. This card, however, proves why Nvidia is leading PC gaming hardware in my view. The additional features that Nvidia offers (hardware accelerated video recording of a game, gamestream, etc Google GeForce Experience if you're interested) are of huge value. I have an Nvidia Shield, and game streaming is awesome - something I couldn't do until I got this card. Furthermore, the stock cooler, while may not be as efficient as third part coolers, is quiet and beautiful. The controversy surrounding this card and it's 3.5GB memory issue are disappointing from Nvidia to say the least, but its performance is still stellar at 1080p and 1440p. I think that 1440p will be a resolution skipped in the mainstream and I do fear for this card when 4k monitors become the standard someday. But at the end of the day, how future proof can you make a GPU purchase? This card is more than capable for everything today with every option turned on at almost any resolution. It's quiet, and efficient with power. What more can you ask for? On the subject of power, I have a Corsair Gold certified PSU, and it pulls 380 watts from the wall (342w estimated equipment load) with both CPU and GPU on full synthetic loads, about 330 watts (300 estimated equipment load) in Bioshock Infinite benchmark. This is wonderfully efficient considering I'm pushing an 80w TDP E3-1231v3 CPU and a couple hard drives. A Radeon 290X can draw that much power ALONE while delivering similar results. I can power a full tilt gaming rig with a 450w power supply, that's amazing to me. I used to overclock, but I honestly got out of it as it become too commercialized (pay more to overclock? - that's exactly what us old school overclockers didn't want to do!). I'd rather have solid quiet components that are power efficient these days and the GTX 970 is a great example. Stock clocks, perfect balance, quiet cool and dripping with performance. If I ever had/wanted to overclock, there's so much thermal headroom, it's laughable. I think I haven't seen the GPU hit over 65C and the fan's barely topped 30%. I'll be honest, I built in a Corsair Air 240 case - a great case btw, but I broke down and put a blue LED strip inside the window, and the GeForce GTX logo lit up looks absolutely awesome under it's glow (almost fluorescent). The logo can adjust brightness based on some algorithms which is a cool effect. I thought I sworn off the computer bling in my adulthood, but I got to admit it looks nice. Lastly, I don't know how supported this card will be compared to an EVGA or MSI. Nvidia no longer has an official overclocking tool (although EVGA and MSI's tools work for this card). I'm unsure if bios updates will be available (but rarely needed for video adapters anyways), but at least the drivers will always be reference. I don't even know why I was allured by the reference GTX 970, but I will say it's quiet the card. I feel like it's not overdone compared to many of the crazy heatpipe designs found on third part cards, and in my cramped Air 240 case I didn't have to worry about either length or most importantly height (as it's standard riser height). I highly recommend this card.

Pros: This has been the best upgrade decision I've made in quite a while for my PC. It's been quite a few years since I have made an upgrade, since 2011. Decided to upgrade from 570's to the 970, and I'm just shocked on how well it's performing. It's quiet, massive for it's size (Be sure to have a large enough case to hold it!) and it's been running all of my games on just about Ultra Settings. Happy to have made this purchase. Con's: Really big, so be sure to have a large enough case to hold it. It's also a power hog, so make sure you have at least between an 800 W or a 1200+ W power supply to work with this beast of a Graphics Card.

First of all I've got to say this card is beautiful, the reference aluminum style design is much more premium looking than the other plasticy looking designs out there. Secondly the thing is very long(longer than my motherboard) so I had to move my harddrive to the bottom slot to even fit it in. This thing can run just about anything maxed out at over 60FPS. I am a little upset that there is really only 3.5 GB of usable ram since I purchased this card because of its performance and 4GB of ram, but I will be keeping it. Despite the ram issue, which the only way you're going to be using more than 3.5GB of ram is in 4k which isn't playable framrates anyways(30 fps or so). I still reccomend this card.

GTX 970 is a high powered piece of hardware that is way cheaper than you would expect. Far Cry 4, Battlefield 4, Titanfall, Shadow of Mordor, and Civilization: V & Beyond Earth all run very smooth at 1080P(60-120 fps), while also maintaining playable framerates(40-60 fps) up to 1440P or in some cases, even 4K(30-40 fps). Now alot has been made of the Memory issues about the GTX 970. What I would say is this. If you are looking for a 1440p or 4K card to max everything, this isn't it. If you want something to crank your settings to max on a 1080P display or want to replace an SLI setup for Nvidia Surround, this may be a good fit. But for the everyday gamer who wants the best Nvidia solution for a single 1080p display, this is your card. It can max anything at that resolution on the market today, and can easily be ready for the next round of blockbuster games coming this year.

Replace 2 GTX 660Ti's in SLI with this one GTX 970. Added 2500 more points once overclocked in 3D Mark over the 2 cards. This cards reference cooling is one of the better ones exhausting hot air out of the case, not re-circulating like most. Benchmarking speeds were solid at 1300mhz core with it boosting to just over 1500mhz! Excellent! Older Games like World of Warcraft look even better with 4x DSR@100% at 1080p resolution with no impact on performance on that game alone. Power savings while getting over twice the performance of one of my 660 Ti's make this a great buy. The lighting was another bonus! Love it!

Bought this card over the GTX 980 after researching for about a month. I use my rig mainly for gaming and some video editing and the 970 handles it without a problem. Running Nvidia Surround on 3 monitors is awesome too. Can play all of the games in my Steam Library at max/ultra settings and am very happy with this card. I've read that the fan can be a little loud, but I have yet to experience this at all. It stays very cool and looks awesome in the case with the Geforce Logo.

I'll be honest, I solely bought this card over a EVGA SSC or an MSI card because I was too impatient to wait several days for shipping when BestBuy had this one in stock. The common things you will read when looking at reviews for the GTX 970 Stock Reference design are "it sucks compared to non-reference cards" and reviews like that. I'm here to tell you I'm shocked by how well this card performed. Ran benchmarks with maximum settings at 1080p in 3DMark Firestrike and Unigine Heaven. Even after several hours of heavily modded Skyrim at max settings and video rendering, even when the card was at 100% usage, it never exceeded 67 degrees Celsius. I am also not much of an overclocker, and I have not yet even tried to self-overclock this card, but the card had a boost clock of 1387 MHz, that's higher than the "factory overclock" of the EVGA For The Win Plus edition GTX 970... Performance? 10/10 for the price, even if it is a bit more expensive than many of the others. Skyrim with over 100 mods at max settings 1080p never went below 45 FPS and was at 60 or above 95% of the time. In Unigine Heaven at 1080p with tessellation at max, graphics on ultra, 16x AA, and 8x MSAA it averaged about 52 FPS with a minimum of 21 FPS in a couple small instances that lasted a fraction of a second that I could not even notice, and a max of about 120 FPS. In Firestrike by 3DMark it averaged about 40 FPS, with a min of 25 and a max of 70 (the lower FPS was due to my processor being a non-overclocked FX 6300, my cooler isn't good enough for overclocking it very far, but planning on upgrading in a few weeks.) Looks? 10/10 again. The reference cooler is by far the nicest in every way. The large green Geforce GTX logo on the side lights up in bright neon green that looks amazing in a case even if the colors don't match (my fans are red.) Heat and Power? 9/10, only ever tapped 70 degrees C once for a very short period of time in 3DMark Firestrike. Power usage is very efficient, but my 750w gold PSU from Corsair can take it even if it wasn't very efficient. Noise? 7/10, if you're like me and use high-quality headphones that really block out outside noise well then the fan's noise isn't noticeable even at 100% speed, however if you plan to use speakers or cheap headphones with this card the fan may be a little noisy for your liking. I will say though, only get this card if you plan to play AAA games with max settings on 1080p, this card is not sufficient for 4K gaming with most games (you'll need a 980ti for that) and 1440p gaming with some games (you'll need a regular 980 for that), and it's way overkill for games like TF2, CSGO (unless you want to play at maximum settings at 144 hz), or Minecraft. Seriously, bugs the heck out of me whenever a rich 12 year old gets a computer with a GTX 970 and an i7 processor just to play minecraft without even putting on shaders... Not to mention it comes with Tom Clancy's The Division for free, the game has bugs but any game that's free is a good game to me. TL;DR: Don't believe the reviews saying the reference sucks, I'm beating the factory overclocks of all of the non-reference GTX 970s and I haven't even touched afterburner yet, and at a comfortable 55-65 degrees Celsius! ---Notes for the Unigine Heaven benchmark screenshot--- Graphics: Ultra Resolution: 1080p Fullscreen: Yes Tessellation: Extreme (max) Anti-Aliasing: 8x (16x is overkill and hurts performance no matter the card) Average FPS: 52.7 Min FPS: 16.4 (Only achieved twice for a 1-2 frame duration, caused by processor, almost unnoticeable.) Max FPS: 115.8 CPU: AMD FX-6300 Six-Core Processor @3.5 GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB DDR5 (reference model) RAM: 8 GB Corsair Vengence @1600 MHz Note the info in the top right corner. Notice that the Graphics speed (core clock) is almost 1400 MHz, without me ever overclocking it. And note the temperature is at 62 degrees Celsius even after the benchmark completed after I re-ran it 5 times after doing 3 runs of 3DMark.

Recomended graphics card. !!! has a nice aluminium back plate covering the whole pcb. was going to buy evga's hybrid watercooled version. but has a short pcb( i like the lady pleasers) and had no back plate, since i wanted a water cooled version. I purchased evgas hydro pump version of the 980 ti( since the 970 Ref, 980 Ref, and 980ti Ref. share the same pcb board) withrad and installed it on my refrence 970. max temp i see is around 42 d.celcius. and idles at 24d celcius on water. no need to wait for nvidias pascal if your gaming at 1080. specks; intel 2700k@ 4.0 ghz Asus z68 MB Ref. 970 8gb ram @1600mhz Cosair Hx 850 Past Videocard : Evga gtx 960 FTW 2GB also puchased at BestBuy

For a while I've wanted to upgrade my graphics cards, before I purchased the GTX 970 I was running two GTX 560ti in SLI. The GTX 970 is such a powerful card for the price! I understand that people wasnt happy about the 3.5gb vram but still this card performance is too good to worry about that unless you're running 1440p or 4k gaming. After I purchased my first 970 I decided to purchase a second one and the performance in SLI is too good, granted as long as the game you're playing supports SLI. PROS: • Reference design GTX970 • Performance • Geforce GTX lights up green • Blower design fan so it exhaust hot air out of the rear of the case. CONS: • Under heavy load it does get around 76 degrees C which is pretty warm but far from overheating. • Gets kinda of loud when the fans speed up since it is a blower design. • Base stock speeds not overclocked from nvidia, granted your can do that yourself. • Price, best buy has these listed at a higher price over other vendors for the GTX 970's Overall, these cards are amazing, I personally love them. I have had a lot of people ask me where I got the reference design 970's from since no other vendor in US makes reference design 970's. You're welcome best buy for the extra sells lol.

Please disregard other reviews of this item, technically.. There are 4 gigs of RAM on this item, but only 3.5 gigs that are used during operation. Don't let this deter you from purchasing this awesome product. Much more performance than previous generation GTX 770 models (I had one..). Plays GTA V at max settings, 1080p, 144hz, ultra settings at around 65 degrees Celsius. Consider purchasing this model rather than the EVGA product, again I've owned both and the EVGA product has coil whine, which really isn't annoying to the typical customer but it's bothersome for those of us who have quiet builds. Takes two 6 pin PCI E rails from your power supply, you can just use your 12V rails, and split them. This is a reference graphics card and has a plate you'll need to take off if you're going to SLI bridge two or more together. Great purchase and I got it on sale for 329.99 with the Witcher III.