Does the EVGA GTX 970 Feature a Manufacturing Defect?

The new Nvidia cards are finally here and they’ve launched with great success; the cards are performing well at a competitive price range and this is very good news for Nvidia. Obviously, not all of the new cards hitting the market are created equally and early suggestions are saying the new EVGA GTX 970 ACX cooler isn’t being used to its full potential.

The images of the new card and its cooler suggest that they’ve used the cooler from a bigger card to save on manufacturing costs; the problem here being that one of the three heat-pipes barely makes any contact with the GPU. Rival cards are out pacing the EVGA card in the cooling department and it’s likely that the card could be performing better in benchmarks if the cooler was used to its full potential.

As you can see in the picture below the chip is barely touching the first heat pipe, although it may not be touching at all as most of the thermal paste on the pipe looks like excess from around the edge of the chip. The 2nd (middle) heat pipe is fine and so is the 3rd on the right; but you can clearly see that the chip is overhanging the heat-pipes by several millimetres on the right. It definitely appears that the chip and the pipes are poorly aligned.

Could EVGA recall the cooler? Or perhaps they’ll be releasing an updated model in the near future? We’ll have to wait and see.

EVGA have yet to comment on this matter, but we’ll update you if we find out more.

UPDATE: EVGA have responded as seen here.

Thank you Reddit for providing us with this information.

Images courtesy of Reddit.