970 question

[RyanF]

So I know there was a whole fiasco with the 970s a while back and how the memory was dodgy or something. Just wondered if that has all now been resolved?

A colleague at work has asked for advice on what GPU to get his son for xmas at a budget of around £200-300 and I was going to recommend the 970 as he wants to stick with Nvidia due to bad AMD experiences.

 

[thebennyboy]

Resolved? No
A problem? Depends

If he's playing at 1080p he'll be fine. Anything higher and he may encounter problems.

A 390 would be better, AMD have come a long way with their drivers and hardware. I would avoid Crossfire and SLI though as both are in a sorry state at the moment.

Out of interest, what bad experiences did he have with AMD?

 

[RyanF]

He's on a fairly old rig so doubt he's running anything more than 1080. Would you rate the 390 over the 970 then? Says the bad experience was an issue with a Radeon card he used to have going pop and taking his mobo with it. Might suggest both options and let him choose.

 

[tommybhoy]

So I know there was a whole fiasco with the 970s a while back and how the memory was dodgy or something. Just wondered if that has all now been resolved?

More or less, vram usage tends to be kept within the full fat vram allocation at the driver level, my only concern would be the longevity of control in place once the 970 is replaced.

Pros and cons to both 970/390, but both are great@1080p with not much to separate them on a level playing field.