The Gainward GTX 970 is simply the best-bang-for-buck GTX 970 that you can get in our market, period. It is based on the similar boxed reference cooler found on its older 760 brethren. I personally find these box coolers to be rather inefficient in terms of noise output and thermal performance compared to some of the more exotic and expensive coolers like TwinFrozr V, DCUII or Windforce. Then again, you get what you pay for and at this price range (RM1099), no other card will come in close to its raw performance.

Not the design per se, but is the metal chokes used. Cheaper solutions usually use lower grade chokes, where the metal coils reverberate (and run hotter) inside a hollow casing. Asus and MSI uses their own SAP and SFC premium alloy chokes, so the coil whine is usually kept at minimum or none. My personal experience running reference based cards, from Titan, 670, 680, R9 290..all faced this problem. Non-reference card so far I only faced is Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X, I have no idea, even with the Black Diamond chokes, I still can hear very noticeable coil whine.

Actually, the only thing I would say is bad about Asus is its current pricing structure only. Sadly, it is way off the charts.

In terms is hardware, it is indeed far superior to Gainward in all regards, albeit the lower overclock out of box. Eteknix themselves summarize it all. However, whether the extra RM300 is justifiable for this, is another matter all together.

www.eteknix.com/asus-strix-geforce-gtx-970-4gb-graphics-card-review/15/

To be clear. There are actually two versions from Gainward. The basic (reference) one which costs RM1099 does not come with a removable fan.

The 2nd is the Gainward 970 Phantom. This version costs RM1199 and comes with two removable fans. This comes factory overclocked and runs at a higher clock rate.

How do you apply the thermal paste on the GPU? A small pea size? I notice manufacturers usually put too much of it. Never really changed before though.

Currently, the price isn't really attractive. At RM1299, there are other slightly better alternatives available, e.g Gainward Phantom which costs only RM1199.

As Darksilver mentioned above, the difference in performance is negligible. I've managed to compare Palit Jetstream 970 (1152MHz) vs. Asus Strix 970 (1114MHz), the difference in performance is only 0.13%, with Jetstream pulling ahead by that miniscule margin. Yes, that little.

Just curious, what game/software that you run when you start to hear this so-called coil whine?

Probably excluded to keep manufacturing costs as low as possible. Even Zotac, Palit and Gainward also doesn't come with the covers. So far I only find MSI, Asus and Gigabyte cards that will provide those covers.

Far weaker.

GTX 960 can definitely handle 1080p fine. Last time I had GTX 760 and I can even play smoothly on High/Ultra at 1080p. The only problem is its current pricing structure. Most units now retail at RM999. For cheaper than that, I think around RM759 you can get AMD's R9 280 which offers nearly similar performance. Top up another RM100 and you can get the stock GTX 970.

Google for Call of Duty Advanced Warfare stuttering and you will get loads of suggestion how to optimize the in-game setting. I did that and now no more stuttering.

The last game I tried around 40+ FPS was Metro Redux. Some of the newer games can be rather punishing.