can of worm's: 390 or 970?

EdwardTeach · 13 Dec 2015 at 14:24

howiepoohs said:
You used the possessive noun when you meant to use a plural. The can does not belong to the worms, it contains them.

apologies it was an auto correct.

Dave2150 · 13 Dec 2015 at 15:43

andybird123 said:
erm, no they don't... I have a wattmeter on mine and if I'm running a single 980ti at 144hz it uses about the same as reviews even with quite a hefty OC

reviewers do their tests with Vsync off, so what monitor they use for testing is irrelevant

Try on the desktop - 144Hz power consumption vs 60hz power consumption.

Maxwell needs to run full 3d clocks to power 144Hz on the desktop/videos etc.

EdwardTeach · 13 Dec 2015 at 15:53

The 390 has almost double the power consumption of the 970. Does anyone have a a handle on what that means in electricity bills. e.g if you were gaming for 2hrs how much would a 390 cost vs 970?

setter · 13 Dec 2015 at 15:54

Dave2150 said:
Try on the desktop - 144Hz power consumption vs 60hz power consumption.

Maxwell needs to run full 3d clocks to power 144Hz on the desktop/videos etc.

Its a bug introduced in a driver update a few months ago. Still waiting on a fix from nv. But as I mentioned earlier, set refresh rate lower and the card will down clock.

humbug · 13 Dec 2015 at 16:03

EdwardTeach said:
The 390 has almost double the power consumption of the 970. Does anyone have a a handle on what that means in electricity bills. e.g if you were gaming for 2hrs how much would a 390 cost vs 970?

The 390 certainly uses more power but almost double is somewhat of an exaggeration.

GTX 970 about 160 to 190
390 about 220 to 250 < some of that is down to the 970 having 8 Memory IC's compared with 16 on the 390.

@ 50 Watts more and £0.15 per KWh its 20 hours of gaming per £0.15

Or 10 days at 2 hours a day, or £9.75 per year at 2 hours a day.

ALXAndy · 13 Dec 2015 at 16:30

Can of worm is.

EdwardTeach · 13 Dec 2015 at 17:31

humbug said:
The 390 certainly uses more power but almost double is somewhat of an exaggeration.

GTX 970 about 160 to 190
390 about 220 to 250 < some of that is down to the 970 having 8 Memory IC's compared with 16 on the 390.

@ 50 Watts more and £0.15 per KWh its 20 hours of gaming per £0.15

Or 10 days at 2 hours a day, or £9.75 per year at 2 hours a day.

Thanks! That is really helpful.

humbug · 13 Dec 2015 at 17:54

faceman123 · 13 Dec 2015 at 18:14

if u oc a 970 will it beat the 390?

Blackjack Davy · 13 Dec 2015 at 18:22

EdwardTeach said:
I am attracted by the fact that some of the 970 won't even activate their fans until the get past a heat threshold, conversely I am concerned about the hear/ noise of the 390.

Why? Do people believe every single rumour they hear?

The MSI 390 does exactly the same the fans don't start spinning until the temps hit 60c and that means gaming the fans aren't any noisier than any other card I've owned. Otherwise its silent.

Randall8686 said:
From what i read there are a few nasty implementations of Freesync but not any G-sync

Source? I have an Acer 34" Freesync and have no complaints other than a small amount of BLB and there seem to be far less reports of issues with than with the Gsync version. Certainly none of this "scan lines" business. The Gsync version costs £135 extra over the Freesync version too, thats Nvidia's premium for you.

Juggy1985 · 13 Dec 2015 at 18:36

I've got my 390 (Sapphire Nitro) running at 1100 Core, 1700 Mem (1040/1500 stock) and its still only hitting around 64c in games. The only time it hits 74c is on benchmark programs.

Its a nice quiet card. Though the crimson drivers dont seem to like Fallout 4 much :-(

. Texture problems and radar glitch.

andybird123 · 13 Dec 2015 at 19:04

Dave2150 said:
Try on the desktop - 144Hz power consumption vs 60hz power consumption.

Maxwell needs to run full 3d clocks to power 144Hz on the desktop/videos etc.

you've made two wrong assumptions

firstly, it doesn't run "full 3d clocks" as for my card that would be 1480mhz as my 24/7 profile, it only goes up to about 800mhz

secondly, if the card runs up its clocks, but is still doing nothing, it doesn't actually affect power usage by much at all - if I go from 120hz to 144hz on desktop the fans still never kick in and it adds about 5w on the power meter

as setter says, you can set 120hz clocks on desktop and it automatically switches to 144 when you spin up a game, so it is a complete non-issue

Doug73458 · 13 Dec 2015 at 19:11

970 without a doubt, great card at a great price

Gregster · 13 Dec 2015 at 20:33

Dave2150 said:
Try on the desktop - 144Hz power consumption vs 60hz power consumption.

Maxwell needs to run full 3d clocks to power 144Hz on the desktop/videos etc.

This is just so wrong lol.

RavenXXX2 · 13 Dec 2015 at 21:11

970 for gameworks.

Davedree · 13 Dec 2015 at 21:36

Gregster said:
This is just so wrong lol.

I know lol, he even forgot to mention two situations with Amd lol.

Firstly that the Amd 390 has a 618% increase in power consumption compared to a gm204 970/980 during video playback.
11w to 79w

Secondly the Amd 390 has a 640% increase in power consumption compared to a gm204 970/980 during multi monitor usage.
10w to 74w

mejinks · 13 Dec 2015 at 23:41

I bought a 390 in the black friday deals and I use an X-star 1440 monitor and its been great. The fan doesn't spin unless i'm playing games and then its not intrusive.

The 970 I used in a friends pc however suffered with unbelievable coil whine, even after trying a different psu and even a ups. It got sent back and the replacement was only slightly better, but my friend just accepted it because he'd heard all these reviews saying that it was expected :eek:

I wouldn't have accepted it but there you go.

On the negative side, my 390 made me upgrade my psu from a 700W thermaltake which I've have for going on 8 years to a 650W Corsair one because the 390 requires 150w on each 8pin connector. The thermaltake only having separate 12volt rails which weren't beefy enough without shutting the machine down

sand_dune · 14 Dec 2015 at 06:54

390 all the way. It's just a better piece of hardware. Part of 970 memory is corrupted. 3.5Gb is not enough nowadays.

nashathedog · 14 Dec 2015 at 07:22

Blackjack Davy said:
Why? Do people believe every single rumour they hear?

The MSI 390 does exactly the same the fans don't start spinning until the temps hit 60c and that means gaming the fans aren't any noisier than any other card I've owned. Otherwise its silent.

From what I understand they all do not just MSI. I know all the Sapphire models do. My Fury tri-x is extremely quiet even under full load and never exceeds 77 degrees no matter what I throw at it.

nashathedog · 14 Dec 2015 at 07:32

Davedree said:
I know lol, he even forgot to mention two situations with Amd lol.

Firstly that the Amd 390 has a 618% increase in power consumption compared to a gm204 970/980 during video playback.
11w to 79w

Secondly the Amd 390 has a 640% increase in power consumption compared to a gm204 970/980 during multi monitor usage.
10w to 74w

A few quid a year is irrelevant.

At the end of the day both cards perform practically the same. The 390 edges it except when gameworks is used and more often than not the gameworks features will need to be be turned down or off on both of them to maintain decent performance especially at 1440.

The 970's lower ram is not a big deal because again most settings that bump the ram up will need to be lowered for performance sake anyway. As time goes on that may change though.

If you want to change the card in a year or two the 390 will be the easier seller in my opinion as the ram will be more relevant then.

Noise and temps should not be an issue with the 390 as they learned the lesson with the 290 and have adequate heatsinks now. Coil whine affects a lot of 970's though so there's the risk of that being a problem.

Overall they'd both serve you well.