GTX 970 surfaced

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

@.Volsung.: When I was buying 680 on Newegg it was the same story. It was "out of stock". The way I bought it was subscribing to notification of arrival. When it appears in stock one literally has to rush and buy it before others do ;D So if you are lucky and pay attention to e-mail notification in time, it can work. The point is, they are produced in small numbers and initial demand is higher than supply. Later it evens out.

 

[volsung]

What do you guys think/know of directron.com? They appear to have the card I want.

Or will amazon/newegg restock anytime soon? I subscribed like Gilrond suggested but still nothing.

 

[tommy5761]

What do you guys think/know of directron.com? They appear to have the card I want.

Or will amazon/newegg restock anytime soon? I subscribed like Gilrond suggested but still nothing.

Never heard of directron but have you tried TigerDirect
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/guidedSearch.asp?CatId=28&sel=Detail;229_176_48674_48674&cm_re=VideoCards-_-Spot 02-_-NVIDIAGeForce

 

[GuyNwah]

What do you guys think/know of directron.com? They appear to have the card I want.

Or will amazon/newegg restock anytime soon? I subscribed like Gilrond suggested but still nothing.

Claims made by directron.com that they have a scarce item in stock are suspect. They are known for taking orders anyway and charging credit cards immediately when they do not have any stock to ship. Beware.

TigerDirect is reputable, and Tommy's link shows they have EVGA's GTX 970 in stock. For how long, I couldn't tell you. TigerDirect is good about backorders: they will not charge until they ship.

Amazon and Newegg are big fish, and big fish get fed first. But these cards are going to be seriously scarce for some time. Demand is far greater than production.

 

[MassEffectReaper]

@.Volsung. I always wondered why people made such a big deal about gpu overclocking! I only ever get 3-4 fps more!

 

[mavowar]

A lot of the super powered gaming PC enthusiasts see overclocking as a challenge and a past time. In reality it serves no point as it hardly affects performance visibly for most desktop applications, which are either hard coded to use a specific number of cores or don't even distribute loads efficiently. Essentially overclocking gives you faster clock speeds for strictly sequential tasks, and although it might improve cache and memory latency I truly think it's more about bragging rights. In other words, figuring at the top of the "benchmark" lists. Some people manage to get their CPU's to well near 5 GHz just because.

There might be others who just follow a trend and don't really know why they do things. There's this common idea of GPU bottlenecking unless you have a CPU clock frequency of [insert arbitrary number here].

I personally agree. I don't think these GPU's will need any overclocking beyond the small factory bump.

I only overclock in a game if I see tangible results. In some games it means the difference of being where I want to be FPS for whatever reason(shooter etc)
I have seen marked improvement of 10-15 fps in some instances.

I do like 3dmark I like to test my ideas on what works and does not......so yes, there is some e-peen to it I suppose though..... and sometimes it does do much.....and can lose in a few rare cases.....

 

[volsung]

Thanks Tommy and Guy. I never heard of directron either so I will pass. They don't have any indication of whether the cards are back ordered or they actually have them, which is suspicious.

I would like to purchase the MSI but I'm not really in a hurry, so I suppose I can wait for Amazon or Newegg. At least I know I won't get ripped off.

 

[yayodeanno.831]

If you're interested in the MSI version of the 970 beware of the infamous fan sticker. Peeling it off will likely damage the fan, better wait for a new batch of cards which will be sticker free
Or buy a Gygabyte/Asus

 

[volsung]

Yeah I have to wait anyway I hope by the time they're back they will be sticker free.

The Asus looks good too. But I had a such a good experience with my current MSI that I just want another one.

Edit: Any news about when MSI will begin shipping sticker free GTX 970's? I could order one on Amazon and let them deliver whenever.

 

[volsung]

Reposting instead of editing since it didn't mark the changes in the thread.

It seems like newegg restocked the MSI GTX 970 4G. Now the million dollar question: Are "GPU bottlenecks" a real thing? Most multicore processors from the past 3 or 4 years are plenty fast, and let's face it gamers love myths.

My situation is this: I will be moving in about a year and will fully upgrade then. In the meantime I want to upgrade my GPU. I have an old Phenom II X6 1090T OC'ed to 3.7 GHz. If I upgrade my GPU now, I will simply be pre-buying one of the components so it's not like I intend to stay this way. But if I won't see much gain from my current GTX 560 Ti, I might as well wait and save some money, get a more recent card, or whatever. I can probably OC a bit more to 3.8 or maybe even 4 GHz (on air).

From what I read a stock (3.2 Ghz) PII 1090T is somewhat comparable to an i5 3570, except in single-threaded applications.

So, suggestions?