14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA is only days away from formally launching the GeForce 900 series of graphics cards based on the Maxwell architecture, so it's not a shock to see info trickling in. It seems we may even have some specs to share with you all.
Not that they're fully likely to be the standard ones. What we have here isn't information on the reference adapters, but one card that has been put together by an NVIDIA OEM. That means that its clocks might not be the ones NVIDIA set for the default video card.
The product you see in the attached photos and which was tested in the benchmarks in the gallery below is the Galaxy GTX 970 GC.
The GeForce GTX 970 is the second best card in the 900 line, with the GTX 980 being the better one. Sadly, data on the latter is still lacking.
The Galaxy GTX 970 GC
This video card possesses a GPU supposedly codenamed 1C32. A chip based on the Maxwell micro-architecture, it, nonetheless, was made on the 28nm manufacturing process, which means that the performance rise and efficiency spike compared to Kepler won't be that great.
NVIDIA did originally plan to have the Maxwell chips mass produced on 20nm or 16nm, but it didn't get its wish because TSMC, its foundry partner (also AMD's partner in this), failed to implement the technologies fast enough.
Anyway, the GPU powering Galaxy's version of NVIDIA's video card has 1,664 CUDA cores, 138 TMUs (texture mapping units), and 32 ROPs (raster operating units).
There is a 256-bit memory interface as well, which connects to 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM with a clock of 7,012 MHz.
Speaking of which, the GPU itself has a base clock of 1,051 MHz, while the Turbo maximum (GPU Boost) is of 1,178 MHz. Again, no clue if this is what NVIDIA set for the card or if overclocking is involved. The GC in the name might suggest an OC state, but we can't confirm for now. Either way, the memory bandwidth is of 224 GB/s.
The build
The Galaxy GeForce GTX 970 GC has a twin-fan cooler with an aluminum heatsink, a high-end VRM, two power ports (8-pin and 6-pin), and a large backplate. The PCB is the usual Galaxy blue.
In the gallery you'll see a PCB as well. That's supposed to be the reference board, but we don't know anything about it, except that it resembles the GTX 670/660Ti/760 cards, whose GK104 have the same pin layout as the GM204 Maxwell GPU.
