Ok, I've posted here twice now trying to figure out what's wrong with my 970. However, I believe I've narrowed down the issue, so bear with me. The issue I mentioned I've narrowed it down to was low gpu usage. For example, in BF4 (multiplayer only for some reason) Gpu usage hovered around 70-80 with dips in the 60's usually, sometimes lower. I blamed this on the drivers because in campaign I can hit a constant 99 percent with few dips for the most part (I blamed this on the drivers as well because it happened in many other games). Whilst in campaign by CPU usage hovered somewhere between 80-90 percent on all cores, fine right? I fiddle around to do some more testing and turn on DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) to 1440p to see if that'll force my gpu to hit 99 percent in multiplayer. I do this and am pretty much getting a constant 99 percent gpu usage but when I do this my Cpu cores all drop to about 50-60 with dips in the 40's and it hinders my frame rate ridiculously. I try the same thing in campaign and cpu usage sits around 75-90 percent usage. I have a EVGA 500w PSU ( 80+ ) so I don't think it's throttling my system since benchmarks show that the power draw with a similar rig to mine sits around 360w. What's your opinion? I'm already in the process of getting a new card from EVGA so see if this fixes my issues as well.
 
Rig:
Evga gtx 970 SC
8gb Ram
I7 4790k 4.0ghz
500w EVGA psu 

Yea its not the power supply. It almost sounds like some sort of cpu bottleneck but I don't see that being possible with a 4790k. Can you see if speedstep is doing something odd and causing your cpu to downclock? If it is only doing this in BF4, I would still say driver problem. You could also run firestrike and post the results, sometimes one part having a low score can help a little. 

You don't want you cpu at 100% usage, if it is then you know you have a bottleneck with the cpu. your cpu in the 30-40 range is a good thing...

What are your scores? having 90-100% gpu usage while your cpu usage is in the 50% range is a good thing, means there are no bottlenecks with the graphics card. You would know if it was your psu being the problem, and its definitely not being that its a 500w and your system max power draw is around 350w.

6000 is pretty low for a 4790k, but should still not be affecting the gpu score. Try turning on k-boost and see if your gpu score goes up

Fennicillin
Is your cpu throttling?

I believe so, yes.

Fennicillin
If it's hitting thermal limits while at default clocks you should rma it.

Oh no, the temps are fine. It never goes past 70 Celsius 

I described what I think is throttling up above. I played Metro 2033 Redux and had constant usage but cpu cores stayed between 40-60 percent

Yeah i think you should just RMA it. You got a bad unit maybe, it's possible. If you however have a good cooling, I suggest you to overclock it and see what happens, even though 4.4 GHz is already a lot, if u could hit a 4.6 and the measure ur score that might save u some RMA headaches. It sounded like ur CPU is getting high temps at first when i read ur post but since u are saying that it stays below 70, try OCing it and if it's the same just RMA it. Not all CPU units are that good...