ACX is an acronym for "Active Cooling Extreme" and as the name suggests, it’s a cooling solution for high-end graphics cards. The downside to this is that the fan speed is locked, and won't slow down or enter its passive mode, even when idle.Coincident with the launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 700 series of products, EVGA unveiled a new invention of its own: the ACX cooler. As such, we set the fans manually to 50 percent, which saw a higher and more constant boost clock emerge. We noticed that the fans didn't seem to want to spin beyond 42 percent, apparently prioritising low noise over boost frequency. One issue we did notice with the ASUS card is that it initially wasn't boosting as high as we'd have expected. The ASUS Strix card has a minor advantage on memory frequency too, as it's able to match the MSI's effective frequency of 7.8GHz whereas the EVGA edition only hits 7.7GHz – this is most likely due to the luck of the drawer. However, in practice the two perform almost identically, as both were boosting to around 1,430MHz under load. However, the higher original base clock of the EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX2 meant that an 11 percent increase here was enough to surpass by the ASUS card. We were able to increase the ASUS base frequency by 15 percent. However, that's not to say that the ASUS or EVGA cards are slouches when it comes to overclocking. The combination of Maxwell's efficiency and MSI's hefty power delivery system clearly serves it well. Even crazier is the fact that it was happy to boost to a constant 1.5GHz! Such frequencies are almost unheard of for graphics cards, especially for bog standard air cooled ones with no voltage modifications. It's the only card to reach a base clock greater than 1,300Mhz, which is just insane for a GPU. As you can see, the best overclocker is the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G, as it reaches the highest base clock and the joint highest memory clock.
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