I was shocked to see this card in 2025, I have yet to test it or clean it. I don't know what to do with this card. That's why I ask the PC community on this card. Thank you.
I was shocked to see this card in 2025, I have yet to test it or clean it. I don't know what to do with this card. That's why I ask the PC community on this card. Thank you.
25 Comments
If it works, it’s the type of card that would do great in a starter rig if you’d know anyone who’d need it.
You can add it as a second GPU to your rig and try to passthrough it to a Virtual Machine for running accelerated Windows 7 / Windows XP
Use it as a display out for a spare pc
Honestly, the 970 is still a pretty great card if you temper your expectations.
hey look, it’s my current card! (it’s suffering I need an upgrade)
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Man, every rig had a 4690K and a GTX 970 back in the day. You could use it on Windows XP, but honestly, I’d see if you could give it a new lease on life with someone who’s desperate for an upgrade from their HD 5450 or their GeForce 210.
There are 3d print GPU stands you can get / make… I just happen to have this exact card on one in our lobby of our shop.
My old buddy I used to work with had dual GTX980s in SLI. He bought them just before the Pascal announcement. I bought a 1080 on launch day and after we both ran benchmarks, he ended up paying a lot more for less performance.
That is a beautiful card but was out shined by the 10xx series into forgottonhood.
It’s the highest supported XP GPU. But if you pair it with an old Ryzen it would make a brilliant starter pc for a kid. Would be a great browsing machine to, overkill but will be powerful and much cheaper than a “new” pc
PhysX, Ultrabudget gaming, Analog DVI output, Windows XP.
plenty of things to do with that card
* donate it or sell it for a few pennies
* disassemble it and make it into an art piece that you can frame
* use it in a potential server bench for media (video encoding and stuff)
* use it for lightweight LLM or AI stuff (i’m not sure how feasible this is but its worth a shot)
* use it as a secondary GPU for something like a VM (niche)
* use it for 3D rendering (also niche but might come in use idk)
* just keep it as a spare gpu that you can plug in if your main card breaks and you need a buffer until you can get a new one
* old game emulation (ps2 / gamecube / etc)
I still have a GTX 960 that I bought new in 2016 sitting in an old system. Still better than (some) integrated graphics.
I generally see these for sale around $50, they don’t have a lot of vram
I am still using that card… Hurts to see it in ewaste
As someone who is currently using this exact card, this thread is really hurting my feelings.
I have that exact same model. And an evga 1070
I have this same exact card, it served it’s time from 2019 to 2023. The vram is absolute shit and even 1080p games will struggle. It felt like a huge upgrade from my 750ti tho and I’ll always love it for that.
A museum piece, but if it works you can get some money from it
That card is in my server rendering plex videos.
My buddy just gave me his old PC (AM4, 3700x). It has a 980 in it. Lol. I am going to use it until I find a decent upgrade.
If that has an analog output you could use it with a crt for retro games.
In my home theater PC I have a GTX 1070 that I use for 3D vision on my projector, my main rig has an RTX 3080, but the 1070 is great for the 3D.
Wasn’t this the GPU that had 4GB of vram but if you used more then 3.5 the performance took a dive?
remember that the biggest controversy of NVIDIA’s cards was the 970 that had 3.5gbs of VRAM and another 0.5 that was slower
I’ve got two of those in various computers, they work amazing