NVIDIA GeForce 900-series cards released

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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.