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NVIDIA GTX 970 OWNERS THREAD

Bought two MSI GTX 970's recently and at the moment as I'm currently gaming at 1080p I'm using one card which works perfectly, probably outperforms the two 670's I previously had. I plan to go 1440p very soon but ran into a worrying issue.

I decided to test out dual cards on several games and the results were shocking to say the least. The confusing thing is that on the Unigine Heaven benchmark my gain was around 90% and the in-game benchmarks were all excellent. Frame rates were both high and consistent.

However, when I actually started playing games my frame rate was all over the place. So far I've tried Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Shadow Of Mordor, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Ryse, Lords Of The Fallen, Alien Isolation, Thief, Hitman Absolution and Bioshock Infinite.

A typical example for you is Battlefield 4. The frame rate would jump as high as around 180 which is somewhere around what I'd expect but then I'd turn round and it's as if the game was loading and struggling to keep up as frame rates drop sharply to around 90 and this fluctuation continues. During Ryse the frame rate was fluctuating rapidly while I was stood still and all other games mentioned produced similar results. Performance with one card is far more stable and consistent.

Is this a problem with 970's? Anyone else having SLI issues or are there settings I need to mess with which may have been defaulted during installation.

If it helps, my specs are:

NZXT Phantom 630 case, Corsair GS800 PSU, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5, AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0Ghz, 16 GB Patriot Viper DDR3 RAM, Samsung 128GB SSD 840 PRO SSD, Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB, MSI GTX 970 SLI.

Anything else that would help just let me know but any assistance or advice here will be very much appreciated as I've been tearing my hair out for the last couple of days and am even considering putting my 670's back in as they ran very smoothly albeit much lower frame rate.
 
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BF4 can be like that sometimes. I run a pair of Titans in SLI and fps can jump about a bit.

Also clock your Cpu as far as you can which should help with low Gpu usage when in SLI.
 
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normski_ said:
I got my hands on the GTX 970 MSI, a G1 and an EVGA SC ACX 2.0 over the last few days.

ALL 3 have coil whine, seemingly at a very similar point, and the higher the frame rate the worse it gets. Limiting to 60 fps makes it all but disappear.

Have settled on the EVGA purely based on the G1 is massive, MSI no backplate and not to my taste colour wise, my PSU having 2 x 6 pin pci-e cables which is ideal for the EVGA, and the free 5 year warranty and backplate offer currently.

I had to RMA an 8800GTS to EVGA about 6 years ago and the service was faultless, and that was before advance RMA.

Also, something I haven't seen mentioned - the molex-pci-e adaptors in the box from EVGA are black braided whereas the ones from the Gigabyte are non-braided bare wires (Urgh).

FANS - All very quiet. Had to flash the EVGA (once I decided to keep it it) to v1.1 bios to get the 0rpm fan on idle that is standard with the MSI. Didn't go as far as flashing the G1 to allow sub 35 percent as wasn't keeping it, but ultimtately all three cards run cool and at 35 percent all are very quiet.

That being said, the EVGA at 4,000 plus RPM's sounds like a plane is about to land in my office (the others are just as bad tbf).
Click to expand...

Really helpful post! I was thinking about sending my EVGA SC back as it does suffer from fairly bad coil whine but I guess it really is a lottery as to whether a card from a different manufacturer has the same issue. Hopefully plenty of gaming and benching might get rid of it or at least reduce it in due course.
 
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=184333.0

Worth having a read if you are running the MSI 970 with the latest drivers. The fan will spin up every 30seconds for a second. Not sure if this is actually effecting the lifespan of the fans but I don't like the idea of it.

I've been having the same issue with 344.60 so reverted back to 344.16 and it's working fine now. People in that thread note that MSI's 0% fan speed is actually 1% which could be causing the issue.

Hope this helps :) I guess it's up to MSI/Nvidia to sort it out. Strange it would be driver related though.
 
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Ecliptica78 said:
Bought two MSI GTX 970's recently and at the moment as I'm currently gaming at 1080p I'm using one card which works perfectly, probably outperforms the two 670's I previously had. I plan to go 1440p very soon but ran into a worrying issue.

I decided to test out dual cards on several games and the results were shocking to say the least. The confusing thing is that on the Unigine Heaven benchmark my gain was around 90% and the in-game benchmarks were all excellent. Frame rates were both high and consistent.

However, when I actually started playing games my frame rate was all over the place. So far I've tried Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Shadow Of Mordor, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Ryse, Lords Of The Fallen, Alien Isolation, Thief, Hitman Absolution and Bioshock Infinite.

A typical example for you is Battlefield 4. The frame rate would jump as high as around 180 which is somewhere around what I'd expect but then I'd turn round and it's as if the game was loading and struggling to keep up as frame rates drop sharply to around 90 and this fluctuation continues. During Ryse the frame rate was fluctuating rapidly while I was stood still and all other games mentioned produced similar results. Performance with one card is far more stable and consistent.

Is this a problem with 970's? Anyone else having SLI issues or are there settings I need to mess with which may have been defaulted during installation.

If it helps, my specs are:

NZXT Phantom 630 case, Corsair GS800 PSU, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5, AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0Ghz, 16 GB Patriot Viper DDR3 RAM, Samsung 128GB SSD 840 PRO SSD, Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB, MSI GTX 970 SLI.

Anything else that would help just let me know but any assistance or advice here will be very much appreciated as I've been tearing my hair out for the last couple of days and am even considering putting my 670's back in as they ran very smoothly albeit much lower frame rate.
Click to expand...

You'll be CPU limited.

Whack open afterburner and turn on the OSD, what is your GPU usage while gaming? I bet it fluctuates between 50-70% when it should be at a constant 90-99%

This will be especially obvious at low resolutions, 1080 for instance

It will improve with higher resolutions.

Only other option is to get a different CPU, 4790k and overclock it (even my 4690k won't cut the mustard with two 970s)
 
El Jimben said:
Really helpful post! I was thinking about sending my EVGA SC back as it does suffer from fairly bad coil whine but I guess it really is a lottery as to whether a card from a different manufacturer has the same issue. Hopefully plenty of gaming and benching might get rid of it or at least reduce it in due course.
Click to expand...

You are welcome :)
 
JamesM said:
You'll be CPU limited.

Whack open afterburner and turn on the OSD, what is your GPU usage while gaming? I bet it fluctuates between 50-70% when it should be at a constant 90-99%

This will be especially obvious at low resolutions, 1080 for instance

It will improve with higher resolutions.

Only other option is to get a different CPU, 4790k and overclock it (even my 4690k won't cut the mustard with two 970s)
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, much appreciated. I did suspect my FX-8350 wasn't up to powering two of these. I'll have a look on afterburner next time I'm gaming and check on usage.

So at 1440p would I be looking at better performance? I hear CPU's even out a little at higher resolutions.

Was considering 4K but I doubt 4GB VRAM is enough going forward. Think I'll settle for the ASUS Swift 1440p G-Sync. If it persists I'll just grab a new MB and CPU down the line.

Thanks again that's taken a little off my mind.
 
Ecliptica78 said:
Bought two MSI GTX 970's recently and at the moment as I'm currently gaming at 1080p I'm using one card which works perfectly, probably outperforms the two 670's I previously had. I plan to go 1440p very soon but ran into a worrying issue.

I decided to test out dual cards on several games and the results were shocking to say the least. The confusing thing is that on the Unigine Heaven benchmark my gain was around 90% and the in-game benchmarks were all excellent. Frame rates were both high and consistent.

However, when I actually started playing games my frame rate was all over the place. So far I've tried Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Shadow Of Mordor, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Ryse, Lords Of The Fallen, Alien Isolation, Thief, Hitman Absolution and Bioshock Infinite.

A typical example for you is Battlefield 4. The frame rate would jump as high as around 180 which is somewhere around what I'd expect but then I'd turn round and it's as if the game was loading and struggling to keep up as frame rates drop sharply to around 90 and this fluctuation continues. During Ryse the frame rate was fluctuating rapidly while I was stood still and all other games mentioned produced similar results. Performance with one card is far more stable and consistent.

Is this a problem with 970's? Anyone else having SLI issues or are there settings I need to mess with which may have been defaulted during installation.

If it helps, my specs are:

NZXT Phantom 630 case, Corsair GS800 PSU, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5, AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0Ghz, 16 GB Patriot Viper DDR3 RAM, Samsung 128GB SSD 840 PRO SSD, Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB, MSI GTX 970 SLI.

Anything else that would help just let me know but any assistance or advice here will be very much appreciated as I've been tearing my hair out for the last couple of days and am even considering putting my 670's back in as they ran very smoothly albeit much lower frame rate.
Click to expand...

You have an AMD CPU and expect multi-gpu to be smooth?
 
JamesM said:
You'll be CPU limited.

Only other option is to get a different CPU, 4790k and overclock it (even my 4690k won't cut the mustard with two 970s)
Click to expand...

Utter nonsense.

The idea that hyper threading, which is barely taken advantage of in any game out there, and even if it is, makes little more than 5% difference in benchmarks, will solve this problem is completely bogus.

He may well be CPU limited with his 8350, but you and him will not be CPU limited with a 4690K to any meaningful degree.
 
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