GTX 970 Coil Whine - Please share your experience


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Most SOB will opt for GTX 970. WAIT! It took Nvidia more than 14 month to have the performance of high end R9 GPU at less expensive price. Change your card to something like GTX 960 if the problem still occur. WAIT! It's going to be a little weaker than 3 years old r9 280x and a little bit less expensive  :o

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Most SOB will opt for GTX 970. WAIT! It took Nvidia more than 14 month to have the performance of high end R9 GPU at less expensive price. Change your card to something like GTX 960 if the problem still occur. WAIT! It's going to be a little weaker than 3 years old r9 280x and a little bit less expensive  :o

 

I think the problem is the OEMs as I have never heard of a reference card/design having these issues. The TDP of the 900 series given the performance of the highest end cards is valuable. But I agree, the early whine problems *are unacceptable. I never heard of it with the 980s and I think now the problems is resolved. There aren't many at $329 and I think that's a result of not being able to get away with cheap components, else coil whine.

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I think the problem is the OEMs as I have never heard of a reference card/design having these issues. The TDP of the 900 series given the performance of the highest end cards is valuable. But I agree, the early whine problems is unacceptable. I never heard of it with the 980s and I think now the problems is resolved.

Quite probably. The difference is that the GTX 980 had a reference cooler, while the GTX 970 didn't. Usually OEMs ship with the reference cooler at launch and quickly add their custom coolers with later revisions - with the GTX 970 the custom coolers were standard at launch.

 

Given how many people seem to be affected I'm thankful that mine are both fine.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think the problem is the OEMs as I have never heard of a reference card/design having these issues. The TDP of the 900 series given the performance of the highest end cards is valuable. But I agree, the early whine problems *are unacceptable. I never heard of it with the 980s and I think now the problems is resolved. There aren't many at $329 and I think that's a result of not being able to get away with cheap components, else coil whine.

See what did i told you..beside the issues you experience with all of that.Meanwhile nvidia get caught pulling another shenanigan trick again with incorrect specification. They are basically lying to you and treated the core customer with douchebag attitude behind the scene and with all of the overly saturated green effect come out of the GPU is nothing than just a fantasy to fool people with uncanny magic.  :shifty: 

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Coil whine is not specific to the gtx 970, it can happen with any high end video card, the severity of coil whine is pretty much luck of the draw. Most high end video cards will coil whine at extremely high framerates (like 1000+ fps), but sometimes you get unlucky and get a card that whines at lower framerates

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See what did i told you..beside the issues you experience with all of that.Meanwhile nvidia get caught pulling another shenanigan trick again with incorrect specification. They are basically lying to you and treated the core customer with douchebag attitude behind the scene and with all of the overly saturated green effect come out of the GPU is nothing than just a fantasy to fool people with uncanny magic.  :shifty: 

 

Yeah, they should have told the truth. But understanding the problem, it doesn't affect me at this time. Not with the games I play and the resolution I play at. I'd buy my Gigabyte G1 970 all over again even if advertises as 3.5GB. It's that good. It will be interesting to see what their updated driver does for those who actually experience an issue. For those who want to return the card supposedly they will help you get a refund. I doubt many are actually negatively affected by it, but, they did deceive about that last 500MB.

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Yeah, they should have told the truth. But understanding the problem, it doesn't affect me at this time. Not with the games I play and the resolution I play at. I'd buy my Gigabyte G1 970 all over again even if advertises as 3.5GB. It's that good. It will be interesting to see what their updated driver does for those who actually experience an issue. For those who want to return the card supposedly they will help you get a refund. I doubt many are actually negatively affected by it, but, they did deceive about that last 500MB.

There is no special driver incoming since it's a hardware flaw design decision. See tweets at the end of this article for source.

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There is no special driver incoming since it's a hardware flaw design decision. See tweets at the end of this article for source.

Well now I feel cheated.
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There is no special driver incoming since it's a hardware flaw design decision. See tweets at the end of this article for source.

 

Yeah they can't, undo it. Perhaps they can speed things up a bit in those particular scenarios? For me non-issue, but I'll take a refund or free game code or something. Not a good move by Nvidia, given the price/performance, they should have just told the truth, or reduced performance (from a 980) in some other way.

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Yeah they can't, undo it. Perhaps they can speed things up a bit in those particular scenarios? For me non-issue, but I'll take a refund or free game code or something. Not a good move by Nvidia, given the price/performance, they should have just told the truth, or reduced performance (from a 980) in some other way.

There's probably not much they can do short of releasing a new revision with the 64 ROPs it was supposed to have. They should have corrected the wrong specs as soon as reviews hit the web rather than stick their head in the sand and hope nobody would notice. Even with the correct specs it was great value at the time, but now AMD is taking full advantage of this mess with very deep cuts to the 290X.

 

I can only dream of those great prices in Europe unfortunately..

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Yeah they can't, undo it. Perhaps they can speed things up a bit in those particular scenarios? For me non-issue, but I'll take a refund or free game code or something. Not a good move by Nvidia, given the price/performance, they should have just told the truth, or reduced performance (from a 980) in some other way.

 

I can play dying light and shadow of mordor on the highest settings at 1080p, thats all i needed.  I dont think even the 980 is a 4k solution anyways, thatll be 1 or 2 gens down the road before ppl max that out.

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The GTX 970 was never really "supposed" to have 64 ROPs, technical marketing just screwed up. I don't understand all the outrage around it, the benchmarks were there since day 1 to prove this is a great performing card whatever marketing did or didn't say. Can't believe some people are returning their cards over this.

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The GTX 970 was never really "supposed" to have 64 ROPs, technical marketing just screwed up. I don't understand all the outrage around it, the benchmarks were there since day 1 to prove this is a great performing card whatever marketing did or didn't say. Can't believe some people are returning their cards over this.

It's about being honest and have a deep respect to your customer which shouldn't involve fraud with three error in a row. L2 Cache,ROP, Turtle 500VRAM. They should have aware it within a month after all the review begin to emerge. This isn't any sort of silly mistake which most likely intend to obsolete the card lifespan rapidly. Nvidia is crippling your hardware and people still attempt to pretend it's no biggie. I'm curious why you trying to point out GTX 970 shouldn't have 64 ROP as 980?? Perhaps too stingy from nvidia.They almost destroy the gaming industry by constantly using GameWork and Proprietary tactic to shave off the competitor. In fact, most recent gamework such as Unity run just as bad as you can think of. 

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The GTX 970 was never really "supposed" to have 64 ROPs, technical marketing just screwed up. I don't understand all the outrage around it, the benchmarks were there since day 1 to prove this is a great performing card whatever marketing did or didn't say. Can't believe some people are returning their cards over this.

"Supposed" meant with the specs it was sold as: 64 ROPs, 2MB L2 cache and 224GB/s fully functional 4GB GDDR5. People are outraged because they received a weaker product than the one they paid money for.

 

Initial marketing screw-up or not, are you saying that not one single NV employee with technical knowledge of the 970, from release until the issue was discovered, read a review or seen the spec sheet in a shop? Excuse me, but I find that scenario extremely unlikely.

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People are outraged because they received a weaker product than the one they paid money for.

It's an implementation detail, what you buy the card for is its performance and the only way to know about performance is to read benchmarks. No one can compute expected performance out of raw specifications. So anyone could know what they were buying by reading benchmarks, the fact that the card contains X number of frobblers instead of Y is completely irrelevant in the vast majority of cases.

 

Initial marketing screw-up or not, are you saying that not one single NV employee with technical knowledge of the 970, from release until the issue was discovered, read a review or seen the spec sheet in a shop? Excuse me, but I find that scenario extremely unlikely.

 

NVIDIA's story is that technical marketing made an assumption and everyone ran with it. So, basically, yeah, almost no one in the company knew the real specs and no one in charge of verifying that (very few people) bothered to double-check with the engineering team (who have better things to do than validating what the rest of the company thinks). That's not a great story, but it's more plausible than NVIDIA's marketing intentionally creating a deception from which they had nothing to gain and which would be easily uncovered within weeks after the launch. See http://anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

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It's about being honest and have a deep respect to your customer which shouldn't involve fraud with three error in a row. L2 Cache,ROP, Turtle 500VRAM. They should have aware it within a month after all the review begin to emerge. This isn't any sort of silly mistake which most likely intend to obsolete the card lifespan rapidly. Nvidia is crippling your hardware and people still attempt to pretend it's no biggie. I'm curious why you trying to point out GTX 970 shouldn't have 64 ROP as 980?? Perhaps too stingy from nvidia.They almost destroy the gaming industry by constantly using GameWork and Proprietary tactic to shave off the competitor. In fact, most recent gamework such as Unity run just as bad as you can think of. 

The only way a card is "supposed" to be is how the engineering team designed it, and the engineering team at NVIDIA designed the GTX 970 to have these specs, so that's the specs it's supposed to have. Why shouldn't the GTX 970 have the same specs as the 980? Because it's a different card with a different design with different specs on that design. If you want the 980, you can buy it.

 

The only issue is that marketing screwed up and published slightly wrong specs, which NVIDIA has apologized and offered a plausible explanation for. So please. This is not part of a master plan to destroy the gaming industry.  :rolleyes:  That's a funny idea actually, NVIDIA destroying the industry responsible for most of its sales.

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The only way a card is "supposed" to be is how the engineering team designed it, and the engineering team at NVIDIA designed the GTX 970 to have these specs, so that's the specs it's supposed to have. Why shouldn't the GTX 970 have the same specs as the 980? Because it's a different card with a different design with different specs on that design. If you want the 980, you can buy it.

 

The only issue is that marketing screwed up and published slightly wrong specs, which NVIDIA has apologized and offered a plausible explanation for. So please. This is not part of a master plan to destroy the gaming industry.  :rolleyes:  That's a funny idea actually, NVIDIA destroying the industry responsible for most of its sales.

It's not much of a differences for 970 to 980. They minor tweak it and disable a few things here and there which's very identical in some ways. They will regret feeding too much for nvidia and the performance gap isn't even huge compare to the competition. Titan is another great example of how they touted as one of the most powerful gpu in the world and cost much more than you expected but to date those performance in game is almost the same or slightly slower than the competition. 

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It's an implementation detail, what you buy the card for is its performance and the only way to know about performance is to read benchmarks. No one can compute expected performance out of raw specifications. So anyone could know what they were buying by reading benchmarks, the fact that the card contains X number of frobblers instead of Y is completely irrelevant in the vast majority of cases.

Just because most people don't care about the specs, legally (in the EU at least) costumers are entitled to a refund if specs don't match reality. And speaking of benchmarks, looks like they didn't cover every usage scenario like people using all the memory.

NVIDIA's story is that technical marketing made an assumption and everyone ran with it. So, basically, yeah, almost no one in the company knew the real specs and no one in charge of verifying that (very few people) bothered to double-check with the engineering team (who have better things to do than validating what the rest of the company thinks). That's not a great story, but it's more plausible than NVIDIA's marketing intentionally creating a deception from which they had nothing to gain and which would be easily uncovered within weeks after the launch. See http://anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

NVIDIA's marketing has proven itself unreliable as of late: the memory is split in two segments, no, wait, the specs are wrong too, but but.. a driver will fix it, no, just forget we said that. Anyway, I didn't say it was a conspiracy, my theory is just that by the time they realised the information was wrong, the decision was made to go with it and hope nobody notices.

 

There's also this developing little nugget, but I'm sure it's just Marketing being overenthusiastic again.

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Just because most people don't care about the specs, legally (in the EU at least) costumers are entitled to a refund if specs don't match reality. And speaking of benchmarks, looks like they didn't cover every usage scenario like people using all the memory.

Sure, they can get their refund if the law requires it, there's just no point. It's the fastest card in its price range so either you'll pay more for the same performance or get a slower card instead. Benchmarks cover typical usage scenarios, and using just between 3.5 and 4GB but not more, and not being bottlenecked elsewhere already, is so extremely specific that even the best technical reviewers have trouble coming up with non-synthetic test cases for that. From the article I linked to:

To that end in the short amount of time we

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It's not much of a differences for 970 to 980. They minor tweak it and disable a few things here and there which's very identical in some ways. They will regret feeding too much for nvidia and the performance gap isn't even huge compare to the competition. 

That's how every video card release from both AMD and NVIDIA has worked. It's much cheaper for many technical reasons to develop a single powerful processor and selectively disable features than to develop entirely different processors for each model. This is just sound design practices.

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Sure, they can get their refund if the law requires it, there's just no point. It's the fastest card in its price range so either you'll pay more for the same performance or get a slower card instead. Benchmarks cover typical usage scenarios, and using just between 3.5 and 4GB but not more, and not being bottlenecked elsewhere already, is so extremely specific that even the best technical reviewers have trouble coming up with non-synthetic test cases for that. From the article I linked to:

To that end in the short amount of time we

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Totally understand why people are upset about the false advertising with the 970, intentional or not it was false advertising.

 

However I think the '3.5 gb performance issue' itself is rather overblown. the card still delivers the same performance that we saw in intitial reviews. We knew from the beginning that the 970 doesn't perform as well at higher resolutions as the r9 290(x). There were 4k benchmarks done on release, the main difference is now we know exactly why.

 

It is a bit silly that none of the major reviewers picked up on the fact that the card prefers to not allocate over 3.5gb ram whenever possible though, perhaps this will result in more thorough benchmark procedures in the future.

 

I can kind of understand how this went unnoticed by reviewers though. We've never seen a card with a configuration like the 970's before. Before maxwell it was impossible to disable part of a memory controller. had maxwell not had this ability, the 970 would have either been much closer to the 980 in price, or it would have had 3gb vram/192bit bus. I think the 970 that we got is better than either of those scenarios.

 

The r9 290x is clearly the better deal now for people on higher resolutions, due to amd's well timed price cuts, however the 970 was good performance for the price at release, and is still a decent deal today (not as good at higher resolutions as the 29 290x, but runs cooler/quieter/less power)

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It's not much of a differences for 970 to 980. They minor tweak it and disable a few things here and there which's very identical in some ways. They will regret feeding too much for nvidia and the performance gap isn't even huge compare to the competition. Titan is another great example of how they touted as one of the most powerful gpu in the world and cost much more than you expected but to date those performance in game is almost the same or slightly slower than the competition. 

 

The performance gap isn't that huge for the top cards, but the performance/TDP is in NVidias favor by a wide margin. Being Small Form Factor is huge for me. I'm running a G1 970 with 4790k and 500W 80 Gold PSU in silence. I actually had issues with power with a 770.

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