Think you mean the 1060 extra £50 for 980 performance the 970 just doesnt make sense anymore
haileris
4 Aug 164#14
Ferrari100 hasn't been on hotukdeals for over 6 weeks now. I wonder why?! :wink: I almost miss him and his sagely unbiased graphics card advice
Latest comments (40)
chapchap
5 Aug 16#40
Lol
chapchap
5 Aug 16#39
New PM you see-more caring than the other toffs so more spent on "care in the community". You'll all the amd fanbois being round up over the coming weeks,
Conchiron
5 Aug 16#38
Definitely would get a RX 480 over a GTX 970 at these prices. Only costs a little more, but it outperforms it comfortably with most games on DX11, and has full support for DX12 which makes it outperform a 1060. Obviously DX12 is only available on a couple games, but the fact that the 480 is newer, and in my opinion it will almost certainly be supported for much, much longer than a 970 (nVidia seem to forget about their cards a couple months after their newest gen, AMD typically have better driver support over time).
If you're looking for value for money, look into a 480, or if you like nVidia more, put a little more money into a 1060.
EDIT: I should add, #1 wait for the price gouging to stop with the 480s, this happens with almost every single card release, retailers whack up their prices while demand is high and supplies are low, after a couple weeks prices should start to come down a touch. #2 480 8GB vs 4GB, if you're looking for value, go 4GB. On a card as powerful as a 480, playing at 1080p, 4GB should be plenty. If any games are using more than 4gb, it's probably heavily taxing the GPU too, so it's not as if the VRAM will be the biggest bottleneck at 4GB. From comparisons I've seen, some games have virtually no change in performance, some can have up to 10% more with an 8GB, but again, if you're after a value card, 4gb should be good.
SupeR130
4 Aug 16#9
damn...got this for 209 on a lightning deal a few weeks back :disappointed:
chapchap to SupeR130
5 Aug 16#37
They don't pay UK tax so...send your card back and buy this one.And just in case you aren't still sold on the idea- they don't treat their UK workers so well.
chapchap
5 Aug 16#36
Lovely stuff.
cacaman123
4 Aug 161#15
Paid 250 ish in january still very happy with it a very able card and plenty for my needs (1080p 60fps) a steal for this price.
SmashingK to cacaman123
5 Aug 161#35
Yeh I bought it back in December and it's a great card. There's really no need to buy a more powerful card at this point unless you're pushing resolutions higher than 1080p as you simply won't see any visible difference.
I play Overwatch with the framerate locked 70fps (set it at 60 in-game but it gives me 70) even though it'll happily do double that just so I can keep the card cool and quiet.
donbarney
5 Aug 16#34
cant see why you would get this over a 480/1060 for a bit more, just save up the extra pennies and dont get something you might regret, not saying this a bad card it just isnt worth getting over the two new ones
jsty3105
5 Aug 161#33
I lolled. I'm sorry.
SupeR130
5 Aug 161#32
So I have a GTX970 and if I was to upgrade to say a gtx 1070 would I need a new motherboard?
XP200
5 Aug 161#31
Very good card, forget the whole 3.5 ram thing, the majority of gamers will never notice any issues while enjoying their gaming, i have the Asus version and i have yet to have a game affected by it so much that i storm off to start a law suit, of course i do not sit with one eye on a fps counter at the top of the screen while the other is play the game waiting to be outraged at a drop of 2 fps and memory useage showing over 3.5 gig. lol
Remember when you played games to have fun. lol
Heat.
xchaotic
5 Aug 16#30
It's a good price for this card and performs well enough in many games at the typical 1080p.
If you game at a higher resolution you probably spent decent amounts of money on display so you should have a more expensive GPU to match.
twoninetynine
5 Aug 16#29
Brilliant price but I'm going for a 1070. Upvoted.
seany1977
5 Aug 161#28
I think it is a good price. PC Hobbyists just talk so much drivel.
russtyk
5 Aug 16#27
Decent card if in your price bracket, shame the newer cards aren't cheaper but this is still a good performer.
The 3.5+5 issue is what it is, but it gets blown out of proportion and generally isn't a problem. If you do hit any problems you just tweak the game settings, same as has always been the case since day 0 with pc gaming.
If it was that big a deal if would have been reflected in all the original reviews, but the performance figures don't lie so go on benchmarks of the games you like rather than specs.
Oh and also there's no real evidence of Nvidia 'gimping' drivers. It's more down to AMD driver optimisations and general hardware architecture improvements.
FrostbiteXIII
5 Aug 16#24
Hi folks, bought this before I went to sleep last night figuring I had a couple weeks to cancel if needed.
My wife is obsessed with Skyrim, will this deal well with the new update coming out?
I'm a lowly Xbox gamer so all this stuff is beyond me!
Thanks in advance! :smiley:
Gkains to FrostbiteXIII
5 Aug 163#26
As people have mentioned, the main problem with this card is that isn't really a 4Gb card but rather has the memory segmented with the last half GB being far slower. So it really is a 3.5GB card + 0.5GB of slow memory.
Nvidia have been getting around this (mostly) with their drivers, but it requires optimisations for each game.
The worry is that now that Pascal (GTX1080/1070/1060) is out, they will no longer have a reason to do those optimisations. Nvidia do not have good reputation of optimising for their old cards. For instance Kepler GTX680 was faster than 7970 when it came out but isb now around 30% slower (plus 3GB vs 2GB is going to last longer anyhow) and around the same speed as 7870. The same with the 780 Ti & 780 vs Hawaii. And the GTX 970 has been falling behind in recent games too.
The only reason why Nvidia may not neglect GTX970 as they did with those others, is that it has been a very, very successful card and even Nvidia are not immune to bad publicity. Although the tech website have become very tame these days and are reluctant to stir anything up and with 70%-80% of the GPU market, Nvidia and their partners are big advertisers...
The new engine for Skyrim, should be similar to Fallout4 and Elder Scrolls Online, but even with the new renderer you'd probably still want to run more mods. And a game with lots of mods is precisely something which is likely to push 4GB+ of GPU memory. But unless you can find someone who has benchmarked Fallout 4 with lots of texture mods, it's hard to predict. All being equal, a 6GB or 8GB might be safer. At this kind of price, the 4GB RX480 would be a safer bet too.
BetaRomeo
5 Aug 161#25
Yes, almost certainly, Skyrim Remastered will run very well on a 970. It should have similar performance to Fallout 4.
However, a lot of people "mod" Skyrim to make it look and/or play differently, and using many of those mods can produce one of the very few times where the 970's VRAM can cause genuine performance problems! The 970 has 4GB of VRAM, but only 3.5GB of that runs at full speed. But if you not planning to mod, or not planning to mod much, then you should be fine.
After all, to get anything better, you're looking at an extra £50.
BetaRomeo
5 Aug 162#23
I'm sorry for any confusion - I was talking about the RX 480, not the six-year-old GTX 480! :smile:
adv
5 Aug 16#22
"matched 480 on perfomance" is an outright lie. It smoked the 580 and 680 and is closer to the 780 in performance
adv
5 Aug 16#21
I play at 1080p and have GTA5 cranked up to the max bar one of the advanced settings with 2 970s. 60+FPS in the vanilla game without mods, rarely drops below 60, and when it does it's barely noticable.
Muffinss
5 Aug 16#20
why is this outdated card so hot when you can get a 480 or 1060
BetaRomeo
5 Aug 161#19
I wavered on voting "hot" on this, as it's an old GPU that should have been this price at least six months ago. But as it matches the 480 on performance, and the B***** has affected the pound so much, it still works out as a reasonable purchase... just!
But anyone considering this, please research your options thoroughly, and possibly wait a little longer! :wink:
He had an alt account for a few days last month, although it was mysteriously banned quite quickly!
I really need him now, I'm not sure whether or not to get a 1060 and I rely on his advice. Although it looks like I could probably get a similarly-informed recommendation from that Syst3mzero chap above me.
cowsindahouse
5 Aug 16#18
same price more or less as the new 470 card, but faster
Syst3mzero
5 Aug 16#17
Wouldn't think they could still charge people so much for a card that caused such performance problems. It should be <£100 since its performance is unacceptable for gaming.
For the price they are asking you could almost get a good card instead.
The Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ is (8 whole gb of fully functional ram) £250 (4gb of fully working ram) £200 and the GTX 1060 cards (with 6gb of as far as we know) from £230.
while yes I understand the price difference I do think its better to pay that little bit more to get a better card than to pay as much £180 for something shoddy and poorly designed rather than fork out that last £20-£70 for something that works.
Before we get the power debate (the original RX 480s power supply mistake) that's why I was more specific with the Radeon card than with NVidias 1060.
brendanhickey
5 Aug 162#16
amazon where selling these as opened box on prime day for £158 I posted the deal and it went cold lol when my card arrived it was brand new
haileris
4 Aug 164#14
Ferrari100 hasn't been on hotukdeals for over 6 weeks now. I wonder why?! :wink: I almost miss him and his sagely unbiased graphics card advice
Sorry my bad. the 1070 Is definitely the way to go over SLI 970s
MeistroUK
4 Aug 16#7
This was on the prime now app for me for same day delivery
Agharta
4 Aug 16#6
OK.
Agharta
4 Aug 163#5
A 1060 doesn't cost around £366; we were talking about SLI. Doh.
DonLeo17
4 Aug 161#4
The reason i mention the ram issue is when my usage goes above 3.5gb in games like GTA v the game starts to stutter. So it would be pointless to throw more horsepower at the problem when the bottleneck in some of the games is VRAM.
Dean2k14
4 Aug 164#3
Think you mean the 1060 extra £50 for 980 performance the 970 just doesnt make sense anymore
Agharta
4 Aug 163#2
Check the benchmarks and see how it does rather than worry about technicalities.
Although a 1070 might make more sense for a similar price.
DonLeo17
4 Aug 16#1
Excellent deal! Would bother with SLI if it wasn't for the 3.5gb ram. But a very good card!
![Fresh Breakfast Meat Box (Using code) @ Campbells Meat [Haggis / Lorne Sausage / Bacon / Black Pudding & More]](/images/topics/208684_1.jpg)
![[Xbox One] Q. u. b. e: Director's Cut on Deals with Gold](/images/topics/208716_1.jpg)
Opening post
You get the MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GD5T for £182.99 @ Amazon - lowest price for a GTX 970 I have seen so far.
Chip: GM204-200-A1 "Maxwell" • Chip clock: 1051MHz, Boost: 1178MHz • Memory: 4GB GDDR5, 1750MHz, 256bit, 196GB/s • Shader Units/TMUs/ROPs: 1664/104/56 • computing power: 3498GFLOPS (Single), 146GFLOPS (Double) • Manufacturing process: 28nm • Power consumption: 145W (TDP), 12W (idle, measured) • DirectX: 12.0 (Feature-Level 12-1) • OpenGL: 4.5 • OpenCL: 1.2 • Vulkan: 1.0 • Shader model: 5.0 • Interface: PCIe 3.0 x16 • Total height: dual-slot • Cooling: 2x Axial-fan (100mm) • Connectors: 2x DVI, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2 • external Power supply: 2x 6-Pin PCIe • Dimensions: 275x125x36mm • Special features: NVIDIA G-Sync, NVIDIA VR-Ready, 3-Way SLI, factory overclocked • Warranty: three years (from date of manufacture, processing through a dealer only) • Attention! Only 3.5GB allocated for high-performance use: 3.5GB @ 196GB/s (224bit), 512MB @ 28GB/s (32bit) • Attention: different revisions in the trade!
Top comments
Latest comments (40)
If you're looking for value for money, look into a 480, or if you like nVidia more, put a little more money into a 1060.
EDIT: I should add, #1 wait for the price gouging to stop with the 480s, this happens with almost every single card release, retailers whack up their prices while demand is high and supplies are low, after a couple weeks prices should start to come down a touch. #2 480 8GB vs 4GB, if you're looking for value, go 4GB. On a card as powerful as a 480, playing at 1080p, 4GB should be plenty. If any games are using more than 4gb, it's probably heavily taxing the GPU too, so it's not as if the VRAM will be the biggest bottleneck at 4GB. From comparisons I've seen, some games have virtually no change in performance, some can have up to 10% more with an 8GB, but again, if you're after a value card, 4gb should be good.
I play Overwatch with the framerate locked 70fps (set it at 60 in-game but it gives me 70) even though it'll happily do double that just so I can keep the card cool and quiet.
I lolled. I'm sorry.
Remember when you played games to have fun. lol
Heat.
If you game at a higher resolution you probably spent decent amounts of money on display so you should have a more expensive GPU to match.
The 3.5+5 issue is what it is, but it gets blown out of proportion and generally isn't a problem. If you do hit any problems you just tweak the game settings, same as has always been the case since day 0 with pc gaming.
If it was that big a deal if would have been reflected in all the original reviews, but the performance figures don't lie so go on benchmarks of the games you like rather than specs.
Oh and also there's no real evidence of Nvidia 'gimping' drivers. It's more down to AMD driver optimisations and general hardware architecture improvements.
My wife is obsessed with Skyrim, will this deal well with the new update coming out?
I'm a lowly Xbox gamer so all this stuff is beyond me!
Thanks in advance! :smiley:
Nvidia have been getting around this (mostly) with their drivers, but it requires optimisations for each game.
The worry is that now that Pascal (GTX1080/1070/1060) is out, they will no longer have a reason to do those optimisations. Nvidia do not have good reputation of optimising for their old cards. For instance Kepler GTX680 was faster than 7970 when it came out but isb now around 30% slower (plus 3GB vs 2GB is going to last longer anyhow) and around the same speed as 7870. The same with the 780 Ti & 780 vs Hawaii. And the GTX 970 has been falling behind in recent games too.
The only reason why Nvidia may not neglect GTX970 as they did with those others, is that it has been a very, very successful card and even Nvidia are not immune to bad publicity. Although the tech website have become very tame these days and are reluctant to stir anything up and with 70%-80% of the GPU market, Nvidia and their partners are big advertisers...
The new engine for Skyrim, should be similar to Fallout4 and Elder Scrolls Online, but even with the new renderer you'd probably still want to run more mods. And a game with lots of mods is precisely something which is likely to push 4GB+ of GPU memory. But unless you can find someone who has benchmarked Fallout 4 with lots of texture mods, it's hard to predict. All being equal, a 6GB or 8GB might be safer. At this kind of price, the 4GB RX480 would be a safer bet too.
However, a lot of people "mod" Skyrim to make it look and/or play differently, and using many of those mods can produce one of the very few times where the 970's VRAM can cause genuine performance problems! The 970 has 4GB of VRAM, but only 3.5GB of that runs at full speed. But if you not planning to mod, or not planning to mod much, then you should be fine.
After all, to get anything better, you're looking at an extra £50.
But anyone considering this, please research your options thoroughly, and possibly wait a little longer! :wink:
He had an alt account for a few days last month, although it was mysteriously banned quite quickly!
I really need him now, I'm not sure whether or not to get a 1060 and I rely on his advice. Although it looks like I could probably get a similarly-informed recommendation from that Syst3mzero chap above me.
For the price they are asking you could almost get a good card instead.
The Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ is (8 whole gb of fully functional ram) £250 (4gb of fully working ram) £200 and the GTX 1060 cards (with 6gb of as far as we know) from £230.
while yes I understand the price difference I do think its better to pay that little bit more to get a better card than to pay as much £180 for something shoddy and poorly designed rather than fork out that last £20-£70 for something that works.
Before we get the power debate (the original RX 480s power supply mistake) that's why I was more specific with the Radeon card than with NVidias 1060.
Although a 1070 might make more sense for a similar price.