EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming Video Card Review
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming might not be the most visually pleasing card around, but it offers solid gaming performance numbers and epic GPU temperatures This card is a viable option for those that don’t already own an NVIDIA Maxwell powered card and are looking for something with impressively low GPU temperatures. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 has been around for more than a year and a half, so the drivers are mature and there are a wide variety of cards available from EVGA and other board partners. We already told you that EVGA has 11 different GTX 970 models available and a quick look at Newegg shows that there are 35 models available from six different board makers.
EVGA set pretty conservative clock speeds on this water cooled card, so when it came to overclocking we weren’t too shocked to see a 200MHz core overclock with full gaming stability. The highest overclock that we could get 3DMark stable was +210 MHz on the core and +550 MHz on the memory, which put us at 1576.5 MHz on the core clock and 8118 MHz (effective) on the 4GB of GDDR5 memory. This is a great overclock and it just goes to show that there is a ton of overhead left in this video card. We are still scratching our heads wondering why EVGA decided to go with such low default clock speeds on this card, but they did. EVGA certainly bins their graphics cards and we aren’t sure how the binning process works on this particular model, but they certainly left some overclocking headroom on our sample.
When it comes to pricing the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hyrbid Gaming 4GB video card can be picked up for $399.99 with free shipping on Amazon. Right now there are no rebates or promotions for the card available, but it does come with the ability to get free game keys for Rise of the Tomb Raider (with purchase) and Bombshell (with registration). This puts the EVGA GeForce GTX Hybrid Gaming about $100 more than the lowest priced GeForce GTX 970 cards and you can find higher clocked air cooled cards for about $75 less. We see enthusiasts that want to get maximum cooling performance being the ones that run out and buy this card with a closed-loop water cooling solution.
If seeing 23C idle and 40C gaming load temperatures doesn’t get you excited this card isn’t for you! Save yourself $75 and go with the air cooled EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC with the ACX 2.0+ GPU cooler for $324.99 that has higher core clock speeds. The EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming isn’t for everyone, but if you like the features and can justify the price tag you’ll end up owning a great card.
Legit Bottom Line: The EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming is one of the most expensive GeForce GTX 970 video cards around, but it has extremely low GPU temperatures!