So another data point. I now own two Gigabyte G1 Gaming V1.0 970 cards, both connected to Dell 2407 monitors. That's one for me and one for the kids, and both are awesome - no eye strain at all. Being a keen 'simmer' I of course need MORE power(!), so I was thinking about a SLI configuration (despite how clunky SLI is these days - but hey I'm desperate here). I'd briefly had both 970 cards in my main machine with a few SLI tests and it seemed OK.
I bought another G1 Gaming 970 V1.0 card cheap to add to my main machine in SLI - plugged it in and... low level eye strain starts?!?! I'm thinking what on earth is going on here? I unplug the new secondary card and strangely the strain seemed to persist. Now I'm getting really worried, so I tried a clean full Nvidia driver re-install and thankfully that seems to have fixed the problem and things are back to normal again. Phew!
I cannot begin to fathom how this secondary card triggers eye strain (hell, it shouldn't have having any impact on the output while inactive) so I will be doing some more testing - swapping the cards around to see just what's going on. But there is one notable difference between the cards, well two actually:
- The cooling fins are slightly different
- This latest card has Samsung memory, rather than the Hynix memory found on both of my previous cards.
I've no idea what the implications of different memory are. I wouldn't have thought that would have any impact. I will look over the BIOS versions but I've never seen any real differences with updated BIOS tests.
Nothing is every easy while exploring what works and what doesn't. Maybe I need to do a stupid expensive trial with a 20x0 series card. I'm not optimistic... anyone else tried a 2000 series card?
EDIT: I've just seen in one of MY OWN postings from a year ago that I've been through this before - Samsung memory on a V1.0 card causes eye strain. Doh. And I've gone and bought another one. Sigh.