That being said, 78 FPS is a very good score, furmark will test your system under much more strain than any current game will on it’s highest graphics settings.

After you hit benchmark, it should take about 3 to 4 minutes.

AMD and Nvidia have built in protection now from FurMark. They throttle themselves, and you can’t turn it off. They still get real hot, but don’t get maximum usage in it now.

Yes, a CPU will impact the GPU score on a benchmark.

Generally, we have found that FurMark is safe to use even though it pushes your GPU to maximum performance.

FurMark will put your GPU under immense stress, during this stress test the GPU temperatures will rise very quickly. Monitor the temperatures at all times, if the temperature continues to rise rapidly above 80°C it is advised to stop the test to prevent further damage to the GPU.

The act of running it under controllable temps won’t harm a GPU, but you could overheat a GPU and cause harm. Newer cards and their drivers control the temps by down clocking if they get too hot, so it isn’t really a big concern, IMO. Overall, it’s an OK tool.

Registered. Intentionally inefficient coding. if it’s inefficient, the software won’t be able to make good use of a gfx real power. i would say furmark utilizes more calculations and memory intensive routines.

Fortunately, there’s one easy test to figure out whether you’ll have a CPU bottleneck: Monitor the CPU and GPU loads while playing a game. If the CPU load is very high (about 70 percent or more) and significantly higher than the video card’s load, then the CPU is causing a bottleneck.

In short, the answer to your question is yes—a faster CPU could theoretically make DLSS-boosted games run faster in some scenarios.

The main hazard of using FurMark is that it may overheat your GPU to the point where temperatures are high enough to cause damage. This may happen if you are using unsafe overclocking settings, have an outdated GPU, or have an inadequate cooling system.

The story is much the same with FurMark. Since this a purely TDP limited scenario the GTX 970 FTW configuration draws 284W at the wall regardless of the clock speed settings used. In this worst case scenario power consumption is 10W less than the GTX 980 at the wall and 71W less than AMD’s R9 290.

Custom preset: 1280×1024 fullscreen, 0X MSAA, 60 seconds, dynamic background, burn-in mode checked in the Settings box Settings: Preset:1080 (1920×1080 fullscreen, 0X MSAA, 60 seconds, dynamic background, burn-in test mode) Other scores can be found online in FurMark GPU Database section.

Still, GTX 970 FTW remains as one of the lower power consuming cards of anything in our lineup. Similarly performing cards such as the GTX 780 and Radeon R9 290XU (which is virtually tied on performance here) clearly draw more power, significantly so in the case of the latter.

If there is an Achilles heel for the GTX 970 FTW then it is idle noise levels. EVGA’s ACX 2.0 cooler just doesn’t idle very well; even at its minimum fan speed, it still pushes enough air to push the sound meter to 42.7 dB. At this noise level the GTX 970 FTW is not in terrible shape, but near-silent at idle it is not.