When ASUS originally kicked off their new STRIX line they gained popularity not only due to the decent overclock and efficient custom cooler but also because there was only a small price premium over the base model.  At a price of $400 on Amazon the card has a price inline with other overclocked models, some base models can be up to $50 less.  [H]ard|OCP investigated this card to see what benefits you could expect from the model in this review, comparing it to the R290 and 290X.  Out of the box the card runs at a core of 1253 -1266MHz and memory of 7GHz, with a bit of overvolting they saw a stable core of 1473 – 1492MHz and memory of 7.832GHz. 

With the new price of the 290X dipping as low as $330 it makes for an interesting choice for GPU shoppers.  The NVIDIA card is far more power efficient and the fans operate at 0dB until the GPU hits 65C, which [H] did not see until after running at full load for a time and even then the highest their manually overclocked card hit was 70C.  On the other hand the AMD card costs $70 less and offers very similar performance.  It is always nice to see competition in the market.

"Today we examine ASUS' take on the GeForce GTX 970 video card. We have the ASUS GTX 970 STRIX DirectCU II OC video card today, and will break down its next-gen performance against an AMD Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X. This video card features 0dB fans, and many factors that improve its chance of extreme overclocking."

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