Closing Statement
On first glance we must admit to having some reservations about this card as its plastic fascia and small PCG did not give us a case of the warm and fuzzies like the PNY GeForce GTX 770 OC2 did. Of course, this XLR8 970 is a totally stock card and as such comes with a asking price that is still more palatable than the 770 OC2 commands! As such we were fully prepared to make certain allowances for the fact that it is designed to meet the demands of a different target audience.
Once we start to actually use this card we quickly realized that PNY XLR8 970 needs no excuses made for it, and its performance speaks more eloquently in its defense than we ever could. To be blunt we like this card and we like it a lot. Some of our new found respect comes from the fact that it is the first x70 video card that downright sips electricity. Though lower power bills have never impressed us much and while a nice bonus it is simply that – a bonus.
Instead of the power savings being important it is more a case of what they represent: high performance per watt. The fact of the matter is this 160 watt TDP card out and out smokes last generations 780 series and does so while using a lot less power to do it. More importantly it does not produce anywhere close to the heatloads that we have come to expect from a high performance video card. This in turn allows the PNY XLR8 970’s ‘stock’ blower to not be as bad as we had feared. To be blunt, this stock blower is just as loud as you would expect a squirrel cage blower to be, but unless you are running Furmark or other synthetic stress tests the core never gets hot enough for the fan to go into full blown panic mode. For most consumers it will spend most of its time humming along at about the same noise level as the average case fan. That is rather impressive engineering.
With that being said, while we do respect this new PNY card, it is far from perfect. Because of the smaller PCB the components it uses are crammed together tighter than then need have been if PNY had used the full length of the card for the PCB. Equally important by opting for a typical blower fan and not their amazing custom design the amount of overclocking you can do on this card will be limited by the cooling solution PNY has opted for. That is a damn shame – as this new generation has loads of headroom for overclocking. PNY would have been much better served by taking a page from Gigabyte and made this a “mITX” length video card with a custom cooler design on it. That would have truly made this card unique, instead of merely very good, and would have made its lack of overclocking headroom much more tolerable.
In the end PNY’s take on what a stock NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 should act and look like certainly has its merits, but it will not be right for everyone. As long as you are not interested in hard core video overclocking its blend of performance, price combined with its lifetime warranty does make for one heck of a value video card. As such it may not be the slam dunk some other XLR8’s were, but it still is impressive nevertheless.
