Interesting, the cooler of the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 ACX series graphics cards seems to be somewhat poorly designed. Well that or somebody forgot to look up the GPU placement on the PCB and didn't compare it to the cooler spec sheet. Photos from reviews with the cooler removed show clearly that the GPU is mounted way off the position of the heatpipes.

Redditors point out, the ACX cooler on last year's EVGA GeForce GTX 760 SC had pretty much the same design with just two of the three direct-touch heatpipes actually touching the GPU. This could explain why EVGA's ACX cooler performs more poorly and noisier in reviews versus other custom cooling solutions. They are missing almost a third of the cooler performance.

Above examples where you can see the problem, basically only two pipes are in contact.

And above an example from the ASUS Strix, the way it should look like (photo's are courtesy of the respective owners Bit-Tech).

You just have to wonder, how stuff like that passes QA (quality analysis) control? Didn't they really notice that when designing the GPU placement on the PCB they needed to compare that with the cooler specs ? Now in defense of EVGA, the cooler still offers enough cooling performance, so if you own one  .. don't worry. It's just that it could have been a good notch better isn't it? It will also be interesting to see how this pans out with the EVGA GTX 980 ACX cards, with a similar cooler and PCB design, that product might be effected similar to the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 ACX series.

An EVGA Step Down ?

EVGA GeForce GTX 970 ACX has misaligned GPU vs heatpipes