NVIDIA GeForce 900-series cards released

[synkr0nized]

Within the past week or so, NVIDIA has dropped the NDA on their new/current video card generation, allowing various sites to publish their views of the just-released GeForce 980 and 970 cards.

Briefly, these cards offer top-line performance with less transistors, less power consumption, and arguably better cooling / temperatures. The 970 comes in at the more affordable price-point, with the 980 being more high-end. However both have achieved benchmarks that give the 7-series Titans a run for their money and appear to make Radeon's top-tier largely obsolete.

Internet speculation assumes the value-focused 960 will come in the next month or two, and a 900-Titan or similar may likewise follow suit.


The numbering system skipped 800 (870, 880 as speculated) due to wanting to signify that these Maxwell cards were a new generation and not to be lined up with the 800-generation mobile cards.


From reviews, the overall opinion seems to be that MSI and ASUS are great choices for these cards for the least noise and great benchmarks; EVGA has gotten complaints of shoddier materials and noisy cooling. Not sure on how Gigabyte's cards fall into folks' opinions.


Unfortunately, stock is still limited on these cards -- they've been out of stock almost immediately on Newegg and Amazon, for example, and will likely remain so until the first couple weeks of October.

Also unfortunate is that this has not yet had any impact on 700-series card prices. 770s and 760s don't seem to have gone down much in price at all.


In any case mid October is looking like something I eagerly await. I have been wanting to replace my aging 460 GTX SLI pair, and I may as well wait until I can get my hands on a 970 instead of spending about the same on a less-powerful and more power-hungry 770.


I wonder if Radeons will have a model to answer this. NVIDIA really appear to have knocked it out of the park with these boards.

[RickZarber]

Oof. I've been running a 260 GTX SLI pair (that I bought in early 2010) which were great for a long time but over the last year are becoming less up to the task of, say, running a game without crashing. (Not only modern stuff, but games older than they are which used to run fine--I don't know if it's incompatibility with newer OS/drivers or if they're just reaching the end of their lifespan or both or whatever.)

I'm drooling over these specs but unfortunately new GPUs are not even remotely a financial priority for me right now. Not to mention I'm still using PCI-E 2, so I'd need to upgrade my whole rig. Maybe someday...

[Revising Ocelot]

I shouldn't be wanting a 970, I've already got a 760. But all the idiot ports made by developers who can't optimise for PC (The Evil Within needs 4GB VRAM? Shadow of Mordor needs SIX for top settings? You can't even get 6 on a card!) make me wonder. I'll be thinking more about it next summer.

[Overcast]

I've been thinking of working in a Maxwell card into my laptop so it can be a bit more energy efficient, so I guess I should keep up with the 900's since I was only looking at the one 800 right now with that kind of infrastructure. Which currently runs much better with significantly less power draw.

[akaSM]

I'll be replacing my mobo before my GPU because one of the fan connectors is failing. My GTX 670 still holds up pretty well and, I don't really have many demanding games so, I'll be fine for a while.

OTOH, I'll begin looking for a laptop because lol thieves. Hopefully I'll find something small and nice with a dedicated GPU.

[synkr0nized]

Shit's never in stock when I am ready to click "purchase".

Damn you all, other video card buyers.

[Azisien]

900 series seems like a really great generation. I have to hand it to NVIDIA because the Maxwell architecture just seems stellar. The past few generations of video cards have been experiencing "mediocre" gains (10-15% performance increases) but Maxwell is looking like 20-30% and it's not even a smaller process yet. The Maxwell architecture on 20nm is going to usher in single card 4K, I think.

No regrets on my new PC, but the video card department was the only bad timing. My overclocked GTX780Ti is just a tiny bit faster than a stock GTX980, and that's nuts. My card is way hotter and a power hog by comparison.

[synkr0nized]

For anyone else interested in one of these cards, I have found Now In Stock to be useful. I don't have an account on the site and cannot customize my alerts, but at least it helps me see which sites to keep an eye on and when stock is reported on them. It also let me know when I was too late to get home from work or traveling for business kept me from catching some of the cards being in stock.



So EVGA, whose cooling setup on most 970s has received a lot of negative responses, have gotten the FTW version out in stock more in recent days. This version has a slightly higher clock and a superior heatpipe solution. I've had a fantastic experience with my EVGA cards before, so despite looking at the MSI and ASUS 970 cards (and missing when they were briefly in stock) over the past couple of weeks I went ahead and ordered one.

Hopefully in a week or so I will get to see how silly my numbers get in the games I still play.

[synkr0nized]

AHAHAH the frames per second even at high in GW2 zergs <3 <3 <3

and I cannot even tell if the fans are on (noise-wise)

[Aldurin]

This 900 series is good, but Nvidia can do better. I expect the 1000 series to drain heat and sound from a small area around it when it is running, while still being a performance boost.