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Power consumption in the desktop enthusiast sector has been rising for some time, so when I got my first hands on with the Maxwell architecture earlier this year I felt it was a huge step forward for Nvidia … and the marketplace as a whole. I was fascinated to see that when the GTX750 ti was overclocked it could keep up with AMD's HD7850 – while consuming half the power under load and getting all the juice it needed direct from the PCI e slot. No additional PCI e connectors needed.
At the time we were interested to see how Nvidia would evolve the new Maxwell architecture into more expensive and powerful solutions.
If you have been reading our launch reviews today you will have already studied our findings from testing the reference Nvidia GTX980 graphics card. In the £400-£500 sector this product really has no challengers. Nvidia's GTX780Ti was already the market leader and the GTX980 takes things a stage further by delivering more performance with a drop in power demands and heat output. The immense overclocking headroom ensures the GTX980 pulls away from overclocked GTX780Ti solutions.
Even though Nvidia have launched the GTX980 today at a lower £430 starting point than the GTX780 ti before it, the price will still prove too prohibitive for most. This is why the GTX970 has been launched today … it is designed for the mass gaming audience who can budget up to £300 for a new upgrade.
Nvidia have launched the reference GTX970 at £259.99 inc vat in the United Kingdom. When overclocked the GTX970 will outperform preoverclocked AMD R9 290X solutions – which can often cost close to £400 inc vat. Nvidia have a reputation for relatively ‘high pricing' so it is quite remarkable that many of the overclocked, custom solutions such as the MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G reviewed today will be available for only £274.99 inc vat.
The MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G comes very highly recommended by KitGuru. The Twin Frozr 5 Hybrid cooler is very efficient, and the fans will only spin when the GPU is tasked to power a game. When watching a movie, or browsing the net the fans will deactivate for complete silence. This is only possible due to the cool running Maxwell architecture which ensures the cooler never has to work too hard, even under heavily loaded situations.
MSI have built their GTX 970 Gaming 4G to very high standards, using new 100mm Torx fans which are designed to increase airflow while reducing turbulence and noise. We could overclock the GTX970 Gaming 4G beyond a 1,400mhz Boost clock speed which places performance levels above an overclocked Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC and even past the Asus GTX780Ti Direct CU II OC which we retested for this review today. We don't have a reference GTX970 at hand, but we would imagine this card will also overclock well – particularly if the reference GTX980 is anything to go by.
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Pros:
- one of the prettiest looking graphics cards we have seen.
- preoverclocked.
- low power demand.
- runs cool.
- fans disable below 50c.
- massive additional overclocking headroom.
- £275 inc vat – a new price to performance ratio leader.
- 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
Cons:
- could have been clocked much higher out of the box without compromising stability under load.
- doesn't need an 8 pin and a 6 pin power connector.
Kitguru says: The MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G is a looker. They say beauty is only skin deep, but this overclocked GTX970 has bags of performance and massive potential for overclocking well past the ‘out of box speeds'. Right now AMD have nothing to come close.
Looking good so far. Expecting even better performance after 2-3 driver releases 🙂
I like the price point. The performance it pretty excellent.
This is a future proof card meaning you probably shouldn’t get this just for 1080p gaming since there are a lot of other cheaper cards out there that does just fine at 1080p.
I’m curious, were you able to run the MSI 970 on just the single 8-pin like you can on the ASUS 970? If so then I don’t think you can consider the extra 6-pin a con. And if it can’t, then oh well, at least there should be some extra stability benefits to it.
I can totally understand the ‘lower than they could be’ clocks out of the box, as if they are clocked to high out of the box and they get a few defunct chips that can’t handle it, it would be far worse PR than ‘look there might be even more potential in your chips’.
I understand the drop of the half star as nothing is perfect but goddamn the 970 looks like it comes about as close a it gets!
So far MSI Twin Frozr V is the best cooler.
So far MSI Twin Frozr V is the best cooler.
Why are the stats compared to the GTX 680 and not the 780/ 780Ti etc?
The issue is, other than looks, what separates these two cards? Performance is almost identical across the board from FPS to temps and thermals.
i cant decide between the msi and asus 970. I prefer the single 8 pin connector and backplate on the asus but the MSI has better cooling is cheaper and is slightly faster =/
Msi site says the hdmi is 1.4 not 2.0
What gives?
you have cash or not, must get it, performance better than 780 + 150Watts + cheaper? OMFGGG
To be fair, the MSI seems to beat the Asus by a couple of fps in every game that I looked at.
Is the extra 6pin for overclocking? I read on another article that the 900 series can handle a lot of overclocking. So, would it be for overclocking stability if it’s able to surpass the amount the 8 pin can handle?
So for 700$ (two GTX 970), we can play in 4K without problems.
Official Certification by the HDMI consortium. The components are 2.0 (NVIDIA spec) just the card itself hasn’t passed the certification yet. No issue.
We actually use the 6 and 8-pin to separate the voltage between the GPU VRM and the memory/io/fan vrm. so, no, it doesn’t guzzle more power when connected, but does allow us to deliver cleaner power to the card.
I suspected that, but thank you for confirming since i had no 4k monitor here to confirm.
The card rocks.
This information should have been delivered to reddit/r/buildapc as that is where most conversation surrounding components and sales occur. Many people were concerned about the 1.4 listing and bought a different brand instead. At a minimum, if should have been mentioned to your selected YouTube reviewers so they could have clarified.
the MSI GTX 970 Gaming is by a long shot better than asus and especially the EVGA cards.
the reference design for the GTX 970 uses a 4+1 power phase design. 4 for the GPU, 1 for the memory. asus uses a 5+2 phase design while MSI beats them all with a 6+2 configuration.
also, asus strix GTX 970 uses a single 8 pin PCE I power input while MSI uses two power inputs, 8 pin and another 6 pin. this will allow much higher overclocks, assuming the chip on your card can handle it.
i have a pair of MSI GTX 970 Gaming cards. one overclocks to 1500MHz the other to 1560MHz with no voltage mods. in SLI they are about one and half times faster than the R9 295×2 i returned last week. they are also dead silent, use less power and produce less heat.
i paid about $680 for the two of them. at this price the performance is just incredible. i’ve been a long time fan of nvidia (but i have owned ATI/AMD cards) but i did not expect them to price this card so low.
Having looked at further benchmarks, the MSI GTX 970 blows the competition away – cheaper than the Strix, more powerful, just as quiet, bigger OC headroom. Unless AMD come out with something amazing, it’ll be my next gpu.
I think the Min and Average values in the Metro: LL benchmark are incorrect and have been confused for the Average and Max values respectively.
I just tested my MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G (at stock like here with exactly the same settings) and my Average: 45 fps and Max: 118. You show the same numbers as the Min and Average respectively.
Shut up
Crazy how this beast rivals the GTX 980 stock AND is ultra efficient/silent. Madness!