G1 970 Does not infact have 4GB and I'm not awfully happy.

[videofletcher]

Last month I recently built a new PC,Everything went to plan. Build can be seen here - http://imgur.com/a/MgpsA

However I purchased the GTX 970 4GB Card.

Since installing and running the card it turns out that it is not a 4GB Card, but a 3GB card. If you are unaware of the issue a simply google search will show many posts from NVidia themseleves acknowlegding that they lied. Many shops are offering refunds.

I do not want to change the card really but I am not happy and would like to know my options franky. I am more then happy with leaving it in my system but I wanted to know if there is anything Scan.co.uk or Gigabyte can do for a loyal customer that has spent extra money for the G1 Version due to its 4GB + LED's.

I understand its not your issue per say but it was advertised at 4GB, and it is only 3GB. Had I had known about this I would have chosen a different card as I wanted to future proof my build.

Are there any vouchers or free games  or anything that you could potentially send to save me the hassle of a lengthly RMA due to false advertising.

I have heard you are offering upgrades to a 980 But I love the blue lights and I dont believe a 980 has them, again, I would just like to know my options and if Gigabyte are aware of this issue.

Thanks, sam.

[javi78]

Also I have a 970 and I'm disgusted by what problems may have in the future 

Where is the offer to upgrade to 980? I would like to think about this option.

[mrav74]

Think they will make a revision with 4gb? Or shoul I just buy this one?

[Cardinal_Fang]

Strictly speaking it is a 4GB card but 512MB of the memory is a lot slower than the rest. If you're running at 1920x1080 or lower you probably won't notice the problem - I've been running mine for a few months now and haven't encountered the slowdown.

[zme-ul]

the real problem is not the segmentation of VRAM, neither the slow access speed but the fact that both pools cannot be accessed at the same time
because:

• pool 1 always has priority
• pool 2 DRAM has to use the same lane/connection to the L2 cache with the last DRAM in pool 1- 7th and 8th DRAM cannot be accessed at the same time

you can never have a GTX 970 using all of it's 4Gb of VRAM at the same time - this is the actual problem

• it can either use the 1st 6 DRAMs and the last (8th)
• or it can use 1st 7 DRAMs

making it a 3,5Gb VRAM card

[Cardinal_Fang]

Not according to Nvidia:

"Under normal conditions (and the vast majority of gaming scenarios), the card relies on the 3.5GB segment alone, turning to the supplementary segment only when necessary. But when a game needs more than 3.5GB of memory, tapping into the secondary segment drags down performance. Some are reporting stutters and frame rate drops as the card uses between 3.5GB and 4GB of memory."

So all 4GB can be used, but once the 0.5GB segment comes into use, performance drops.

[zme-ul]

"according to nVidia" .. please  nVidia lied and will lie again to cover their hide
read the AnandTech article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

This in turn is why the 224GB/sec memory bandwidth number for the GTX 970 is technically correct and yet still not entirely useful as we move past the memory controllers, as it is not possible to actually get that much bandwidth at once when doing a pure read or a pure write. In the case of pure reads for example, GTX 970 can read the 3.5GB segment at 196GB/sec (7GHz * 7 ports * 32-bits), or it can read the 512MB segment at 28GB/sec, but it cannot read from both at once; it is a true XOR situation. The same is also true for writes, as only one segment can be written to at a time.

[Dalork]

So I'm wondering what have those done about this issue if it was a problem or annoyed them? And where did they hear Gigabyte was offering replacement 980 cards?