Nereus
 
Just installed a GTX-970 SC (04G-P4-1972-KR) in my wife's desktop yesterday. Ran it through some AIDA64 stress tests last night and it barely reached the low 70's at stock settings under full load, and that's with ~76F ambient, so the temperatures/cooling seems good, and it's definitely an improvement over her previous card, a vanilla GTX-580. The 970 weighs like half the weight of the 580, if that.. noticed that immediately.
 
I have not tried overclocking it, but Precision 4.2.1 functions with this card without issue so far.
 
There does seem to be a little bit of noise, like a teeny tiny turbine starting up, but my Mrs didn't seem to notice it. Maybe that is coil whine? I've never had coil whine before so I'm not sure if it's that or just the fan noise. I'm going to give it a few days anyway and see if it just needs a bit of a settling in period, or maybe I'm just not used to sitting at her workstation and that is the normal noise... Sorry I haven't benchmarked or anything yet, just don't have the time.
 
 

Thanks for the info!  I'm not so much concerned about fan noise assuming it is operating normally, it's that dang coil whine that I hope to avoid (in the process of returning a Zotac 970 that emits a loud buzzing sound).  I purchased the same card, the superclocked EVGA 970, hoping to have a good experience with it as it is my first EVGA purchase.  Despite their overwhelming reputation prior to the 900 series launch, post launch they have been facing a lot of criticism from what I have gathered. Just hoping to get a reasonably quiet card with no coil whine/buzzing that operates near 70 C max at full load

Hi everyone, I just bought the 04G-P4-1972-KR and did my first build with it. Card seems to be working fine, but when I go to GeForce Experience and go to LED Visualizer and click Configure I get this message: "Supported NVIDIA cards are not found on the system." 

Card seems to be working fine, already played Diablo 3 with it. GeForce Experience tells me everything is good to go with setting up LED visualizer, but then I get this message. Any help would be appreciated. I'm coming off a decade of Mac only use, so I'm totally new to all this. 

oh, duh doy. welp, that's embarrassing that i didn't notice that. thank you though. loving the card. 

thefogo

Here's what the short pcb blowers sound like at idle. The grinding noise is pretty bad in my opinion.

I have the 970 SC and it sounds nothing like the 670 in the video.  It's a very dull sound that isn't louder than my case fans even at a high speed.  I can't even hear it at idle.

Nereus
Just installed a GTX-970 SC (04G-P4-1972-KR) in my wife's desktop yesterday. Ran it through some AIDA64 stress tests last night and it barely reached the low 70's at stock settings under full load, and that's with ~76F ambient, so the temperatures/cooling seems good, and it's definitely an improvement over her previous card, a vanilla GTX-580. The 970 weighs like half the weight of the 580, if that.. noticed that immediately.
 
I have not tried overclocking it, but Precision 4.2.1 functions with this card without issue so far.
 
There does seem to be a little bit of noise, like a teeny tiny turbine starting up, but my Mrs didn't seem to notice it. Maybe that is coil whine? I've never had coil whine before so I'm not sure if it's that or just the fan noise. I'm going to give it a few days anyway and see if it just needs a bit of a settling in period, or maybe I'm just not used to sitting at her workstation and that is the normal noise... Sorry I haven't benchmarked or anything yet, just don't have the time.

I just did a quick run of 3DMark11 and FireStrike on my wife's desktop (just one run of each). Stock clock on the 970SC and a mild 4GHz clock on the i7-3820. Temps stayed low throughout (high 60's max) which was impressive, although it's a little cooler out tonight. Scores as follows:
 
3DMark11 : P13253
FireStrike : 9733
 
That's a better score than a previous setup of an i7-930 with 2 x GTX-580 cards (P11708 on 3DMark11).
 
Unfortunately that turbine whine sound is still there, particularly under load, so I did the highly technical 'finger on the fan' test, and it is definitely the fan producing the noise, not coil whine. I have a couple of non-ACX GTX-980SC cards to install on my own desktop; providing those fans run ok, I may do a step-up to a 980SC for my wife instead of trying to RMA the 970SC. The noise isn't particularly loud at all, it's just the pitch that is a little annoying. With headphones on or speakers on with a bit of volume, you probably wouldn't even notice it. 
 
In a nutshell, performance and cooling is excellent on these 970SC cards, and unbeatable value for money. A few may have a bit of fan noise, but it's not extreme by any means, at least not in my case, and it may not be an issue for many anyway.  
 
Cheers.
 

I recently purchased the same EVGA GTX 970 SC for use in my Alienware X51 R2 to replace the stock GTX 760ti. I am impressed with the speed of this card, as it is posting 1342mhz in boost despite the 1279mhz in the reference specs (which I can't figure out), and I have been able to post a Heaven 4.0 score of 2200 on the dot, which is about 1000 higher than my 760ti could do. I am running Heaven at High Quality, Tesselation Normal, 2xAA, 1080p, and have scored as high as 2249 on a continuous loop.

What is really making me confused and upset, however, is the temperature of this card. I am seeing literally as high as 88c during benchmarking after 15 minutes or so, and it sustains these temps (without throttling below 1329mhz or artifacting at all, so, I can't seem to see that there is anything seriously wrong with the chipset). I am also running AC4: Black Flag at max settings and having the same outrageously high temps, even up to 91-92c.

The X51 is a tight case, but it has an additional fan placed directly adjacent to the front end of the GPU that sucks air into the path of the GPU's blower intake, and the room temp is only 24c and climate controlled. Idle GPU temp is around 40-45c, which I would expect, but even with an aggressive fan profile (100% at 80c), I am peaking at 86-91c during these benchmarks or 30-60 minutes of AC4, which seems horribly hot for such a new card at stock speeds. I sprung for the 5yr extended warranty because I want this baby to last, and I am already considering an RMA or a replacement.

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated immensely. I am attached to this card, but not this particular one, and am strongly considering getting another of the same to replace this one and enact my warranty.

GUMP0
I recently purchased the same EVGA GTX 970 SC for use in my Alienware X51 R2 to replace the stock GTX 760ti. I am impressed with the speed of this card, as it is posting 1342mhz in boost despite the 1279mhz in the reference specs (which I can't figure out), and I have been able to post a Heaven 4.0 score of 2200 on the dot, which is about 1000 higher than my 760ti could do. I am running Heaven at High Quality, Tesselation Normal, 2xAA, 1080p, and have scored as high as 2249 on a continuous loop.

What is really making me confused and upset, however, is the temperature of this card. I am seeing literally as high as 88c during benchmarking after 15 minutes or so, and it sustains these temps (without throttling below 1329mhz or artifacting at all, so, I can't seem to see that there is anything seriously wrong with the chipset). I am also running AC4: Black Flag at max settings and having the same outrageously high temps, even up to 91-92c.

The X51 is a tight case, but it has an additional fan placed directly adjacent to the front end of the GPU that sucks air into the path of the GPU's blower intake, and the room temp is only 24c and climate controlled. Idle GPU temp is around 40-45c, which I would expect, but even with an aggressive fan profile (100% at 80c), I am peaking at 86-91c during these benchmarks or 30-60 minutes of AC4, which seems horribly hot for such a new card at stock speeds. I sprung for the 5yr extended warranty because I want this baby to last, and I am already considering an RMA or a replacement.

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated immensely. I am attached to this card, but not this particular one, and am strongly considering getting another of the same to replace this one and enact my warranty.

I think your card is faulty. My 970s idled at under 30C and load was 75C.

bigman66
Bit the bullet yesterday and bought a 04G-P4-1972-KR....
 
Noise wise it is fine from my perspective - can't hear the blower fan above normal case noise and there is no perceivable coil whine..Running it at stock speeds at the moment - I have a Silverstone ft03-mini case so I have EXTREMELY limited airflow and I really don't want to push things :-)
 
GPU temp at idle is sitting at 29C which is great - Ran heaven benchmark last night and temp was bouncing at the 80C for most of the benchmark..
FPS:71.7
Score:1806
Min FPS:29.5
Max FPS:145.2
 
Overall very happy with the card -  would be nice to be able to get a backplate for it... Cabling and pipes from the H60 AIO are very close to (If not rubbing on) the back of the card... Will just have to keep a look out :-)

What are your settings when running Heaven?

seanrm
 
 
What are your settings when running Heaven?

Never tried running his before so may bed doing it wrong :-) But setting were:
 
 
Render: Direct3D11
Mode: 1920x1080 4xAA fullscreen
Prese:t Custom
Quality: Ultra
Tessellation: Normal
 

I never understood the clocking of the latest cards completely but is it really that weird?
When i do no overclocking and use the default fan profile this card slows itself down all the time.
After 5 minutes into Crysis 3 for example i see a max Power of ~82%, 1.100V and a clock around 1200 but a modest working fan.
Is this not a broken design? I mean that i don't get the default SC clocks without using a custom fan profile feels a bit strange to me.

It keeps itself at 79° and the fan is working around 2000 for that.

Temperature target? I use Afterburner, the evga soft is to buggy here, crashed my TV app when i tried. How to set a different target?
I bet it will work then but i still wonder why under default the fan doesn't speed up to keep the clock at SC speed. I use adaptive vsync mostly.
 
 

I don't limit frames. The 970 in Crysis 3 doesn't reach the full vsync framerate with the settings i test here. I still can't figure out how to set a new temperature target with Afterburner.
-> Found the switch, lol. Testing.