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Videocard Buyer’s Guide - It’s All About Looks (Part 1) - MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming Edition

9/5/2013 9:24:27 AM

“There hasn’t been a whole lot of change with the silicone”

There’s has been a refresh of Kepler last month with three new cards available for your gaming pleasure. At the bottom of the pile are the GTX 760 Ti (not yet released), the GTX 770 and the GTX 780. Each of these cards is a “refresh” in the Kepler series, though it each has managed to ear themselves a GTX 7 Series badge. The GTX 760 Ti will ideally fill the market space of the current GTX 670, while the GTX 770 is set for replacing the GTX 680 and finally the GTX 780 fits somewhere in between the GTX 770 and the Almighty GTX Titan in term of raw compute power. Overall, there hasn’t been a whole lot of change happening with the silicone, with most advancements being on memory and GPU clock speeds. The GTX 780, however, does net itself an extra 1GB of DDR RAM when compared to the GTX 680; something many ultra-high resolution users will no doubt enjoy. Given that brief intro to the small changes made to the cards, let’s move on!

MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming Edition

The chilliest GPU

Price: $529

MSI has always provided stiff competition to ASUS and Gigabyte in the GPU marketplace, and the launch of the GTX 770 was no different. MSI are currently offering a handful of GTX 770 video cards, though the one we were most excited to look at is the new “G” (gaming) series card from MSI. What you essentially get with this card is a middle ground between the vanilla Twin Frozr cards on offer, and the beefed up Lighting series aimed at over-clockers and high-end enthusiasts. You can quickly tell this cards market audience not only by the fact it is factory overclocked, but also by its bundled software.

MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming Edition

MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming Edition

MSI has been kind enough to include two cool new software, the first of which is called quite simply the “MSI Gaming App”. This is a very simple tool, allowing for a quick switch between three different presets on your video card, gaming mode, eco mode and default mode. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what each of these three modes accomplish and they will surely be welcomed by gamers wanting superior control over their GPU without having to setup custom profiles in MSI Afterburner and fiddle around with confusing voltages and stability issues.

The next cool software included in the package is called “Predator”. This application allows the user to capture video and screenshots using pre-determined folder destinations with simply one button activation. The performance loss on video recording obviously deviates depending on your recording resolution and frame rate, though in our opinion it was a lot smoother than FRAPS, and used up less hard disk space for the video files when recording in comparable qualities.

Gaming performance is, as you’d expect, nothing short of superb, with the GTX 770 performing slightly above a reference GTX 680, this overclocked edition manages to take a more noticeable lead. This however isn’t necessarily giving you any better value for money as since the launch of the GTX 770 we’ve been a fairly steady decline in the sale price of the GTX 680 with reference models going on sale for as little as $419, while this card is commanding a $519 price tag. Does it perform $100 better than a GTX 680? Probably not, though there are more important things than raw frames per second to some people.

There is still one glimmer of hope left however, and that is thermal results! The new Twin Frozr IV cooler equipped on this card manages to keep the GPU core at a nice and cool 28C, one of our lowest results ever and more than 11C cooler than your average GTX 680. This is possible by using the included “MSI Gaming App” and setting the card to “Eco Mode” before taking our reading. If left on default mode, our reading was a little higher at 30C.

The new Twin Frozr IV cooler equipped on this card manages to keep the GPU core at a nice and cool 28C, one of our lowest results ever and more than 11C cooler than your average GTX 680

The new Twin Frozr IV cooler equipped on this card manages to keep the GPU core at a nice and cool 28C, one of our lowest results ever and more than 11C cooler than your average GTX 680

Load temperatures were also very impressive as the Gaming App also takes control of fan profiles. With Gaming Mode selected we played our usual BF3 map loop and recorded a temperature of only 60C. The card remained at more than acceptable acoustic level both inside a PC case and whilst sitting on an open test bench. Comparing these results once more to the reference-cooled GTX 680, we observed 19C lower temperatures, despite a higher power draw.

Verdict: 7/10

·         Robust performance

·         Outstanding thermals

·         Nice bundled software

·         Mid-range price

·         Disappointing core clock

·         A great card if you will use the bundled-in software.

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