If you've read my earlier post here, you would see the 970 FTW has severe TDP throttling issues which causes excess tearing, stutter, and GPU utilization hiccuping:
forums evga com/Can-I-get-an-EVGA-response-on-some-970-GTX-FTW-TDP-issues-m2244186.aspx
I have modded a 970 FTW BIOS to fix those issues. Don't use the BIOS on a base model or SC card, since I think those have a different voltage controller, while I think the SSC and FTW use the same one.
The only thing changed at all in the BIOS from stock is changing default TDP limit from 170w default/187w with 110% power slider, to 220w default/242w with 110% power slider. The card will now hold full boost clock and 99% GPU utilization without constantly throttling, just like the Gigabyte 970. I chose the 220w number for two reasons. Each PCIE power cable is rated for 75w, plus the PCIE port is rated for another 75w, bringing the total to 225w and I wanted to keep numbers within spec to minimize problems. The second reason is that I read the 970 has to pull power symmetrically from it's three power sources and you wouldn't really want to pull more than 75w from the PCIE port. I don't know if that applies to all aftermarket cards, but Nvidia claimed it was a limitation. If you leave the power slider at default, it should not have any issues.
The 970 FTW card uses four power phases, so you can't feed it enormous amounts of power, but the 570 GTX also had four phases and used 213w at stock, so the 970 FTW should be fine increased to 220w. While running Metro 2033 Redux to test, the 970 FTW card wants 196watts of power in order to not hard throttle and cause tearing/stutter. This means the stock BIOS is 26 watts short of power to not perform like an El Camino with power slider at default, and 9 watts short of power with slider at 110%. Here's a picture while running the BIOS with TDP problems fixed. Notice nothing is hiccuping and boost and GPU utilization hold solid. The graphs look far better than the stock BIOS.
Link to BIOS and NVFLASH for Maxwell:
overclock net/t/1522035/evga-970-ftw-tdp-issues-requires-bios-mod-to-fix 1) Place the files in a folder on your C drive
2) Open Device Manager on your computer. Under the "Display Adapter" tab, right click your 970 FTW card and click disable (I actually uninstalled Nvidia driver and reset computer before doing this step).
3) Open a command prompt (to get to it, open a windows search box and type "cmd" and when it comes up, right click it and run as administrator.
4) Navigate to the folder with the files in it
5) Type nvflash 225250.rom (or nvflash -6 225250.rom to override device ID for flashing a SSC card but I don't know if the SSC is compatible with FTW BIOS)
6) Go back in Device manager and re-enable the card