Product on review: STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5
Manufacturer & Sponsor: ASUS
Street Price: £299 / $398.99
Take a Maxwell Core, overclock it and then add arguably the best air cooling solution available and what do you get? The ASUS Strix GTX 970 OC. This card appears to have it all, the latest technology from NVIDIA, supreme cooling in the form of the ASUS Direct CU II and a subtle, yet significant factory overclock. This along with the excellent ASUS support makes for a very mouth watering graphics card. The GTX 980 reigns supreme currently, easily bettering the AMD R9-290X so how the GTX 970 will fair remains to be seen but with a slightly lower specification than the GTX 980, ASUS hope to close this deficit somewhat by overclocking the GTX 970 core.
NVIDIA, it seems are aiming this card squarely at the feet of the R9-290 so it is fair to suspect that the GTX 970 will fall somewhere between the performance of the R9-290X and R9-290. However, with AMD's recent price drops to the R9 range, the R9-290X is now a little cheaper than most overclocked GTX 970's including this one which makes the battle all the more interesting as the card we have for review today weighs in at £300. It is fair to say that NVIDIA have traditionally been more expensive than their AMD counterpart so perhaps the price differential should come as no surprise but when NVIDIA's second best is slightly more expensive than AMD's finest, it had better have the performance to warrant such a price tag.
ASUS on thier Strix range:
Taken from the ancient Roman and Greek word for owl, Strix means the keenest hearing and sharpest eyesight. Strix means feeling your environment so that you detect and react to the slightest movement. Strix means survival on the very edge of instinct. Strix is in your blood, as it is in ours.
