Graphics cards/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
NVIDIA · GeForce GTX 900 · Desktop
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 is NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop graphics card with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory, 1,664 shading units and a boost clock of 1178 MHz.
Drawn from this part’s own specifications. No openly-licensed photograph of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 exists, so this is an illustration rather than a photograph.
Overview
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 is NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop graphics card with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory, 1,664 shading units and a boost clock of 1178 MHz. These are the manufacturer’s published figures. They describe what the chip is designed to do, not what your particular machine does with it, and the gap between those two is usually cooling. A boost clock is a ceiling rather than a promise, and how long a graphics card holds it under continuous load is the one thing no specification sheet can tell you.
Specifications
- Architecture
- Maxwell
- Shading units
- 1,664
- Base clock
- 1050 MHz
- Boost clock
- 1178 MHz
- Memory
- 4 GB
- Memory type
- GDDR5
- Memory bus
- 256-bit
- TDP
- 145 W
- Process
- Not verified
- Launched
- 2014-09-18
Comparable within an architecture. Across vendors or generations it is not a like-for-like count.
Board power, not measured draw. A laptop GPU's power is a range the laptop maker chooses within.
Sources
Each figure, the label its source printed beside it, and the day it was read.
| Figure | As printed | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| ArchitectureMaxwell | Release textunder GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Shading units1,664 | CUDA Coresunder GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Base clock1050 MHz | Base Clock (MHz)under GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Boost clock1178 MHz | Boost Clock (MHz)under GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory4 GB | Standard Memory Configunder GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory typeGDDR5 | Memory Interfaceunder GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Memory bus256-bit | Memory Interface Widthunder GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| TDP145 W | Graphics Card Power (W)under GeForce GTX 970 | nvidia.comSpecification page | |
| Launched2014-09-18 | The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GPUs are now available | nvidianews.nvidia.comLaunch release |
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Compare
The 6 nearest graphics cards in the same segment, each with a published side-by-side.
Other graphics cards in NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900
What these numbers mean
Every figure on this sheet is a design target. None of it is a measurement.
Nothing above describes how a graphics card behaves twenty minutes into a sustained workload, which is where two chips with nearly identical specifications routinely diverge. A boost clock is a ceiling the vendor permits, not a rate the chip sustains, and whether it holds depends on the cooling, the case, the power profile and the room. None of those appear on a specification sheet.
We deliberately do not reduce these figures to a single score. A composite invented from specifications would look authoritative and measure nothing, and choosing the weights would be choosing the winner.