The Geforce GTX 970 is probably the most attractive cards in performance market. It doesn’t cost arm or leg and for around $350 you can get really great card. The card is based on Maxwell architecture and doesn’t need a lot of power but offers great gaming experience.

Some of the cards suffer from Coil Whine but at the same time, it is hard to hear this unpleasant noise in a closed case. It turns out that some components probably R22 inductors are to blame and not all the cards are affected. A lot of people wanted to RMA their cards as they didn’t like the noise.

The Geforce GTX 980 cards are not affected by the issue as all the GTX 980cards are manufactured under Nvidia supervision. One can imagine that Taiwanese partners decided to use cheaper components to make slightly larger profits as higher end components don’t get affected by the issue.

Geforce GTX 970 are hard to find, Newegg had one card in stock while yesterday it had three. They sell out rather fast and we had difficulties to find them in stock anywhere else.

Its competition, the Hawaii based Radeon R290, looks quite attractive and a bit easier to find. They are selling for $260 after the mail-in rebate and are not that far off performance wise. They do need a bit more power but since it's hard to find GTX 970 in stock this shortage might get some more customers AMD way.

The Geforce GTX 960m which is a mainstream version of the Maxwell 2.0, is expected early next year as it seems like Nvidia cannot make enough higher end Maxwell cards and yet it still has quite a few Kepler cards including Geforce GTX 760. These are still quite popular cards among the upgrade market.