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Last week AMD tweaked their HD7850 design of yesteryear, making some I/O output and power changes while dropping the price to a highly competitive £100. There is no doubt that the new R7 265 graphics card is currently the fastest £100 budget oriented enthusiast grade gaming card that money can buy.
In some ways though I have to admit I was disappointed to see that AMD hadn't decided to bring a completely new design to market. Tweaking graphics cards and releasing them under a new name doesn't really push the market forward, although it is not only AMD who have fallen foul of ‘rebadging' and re-releasing hardware in recent years.
The MSI GTX 750 Ti OC Twin Frozr reviewed today is clearly not in the same performance bracket as the newly launched AMD R7 265, although I feel to end our conclusion with only a frame rate comparison would be a great injustice to Nvidia.
Nvidia's new Maxwell architecture is remarkable. Nvidia have placed a focus on reducing power consumption as far as possible and the fact that the GTX 750 Ti doesn't even require a PCIe power cable for operation is significant in itself.
The MSI GTX 750 TI OC is an extremely quiet running card, breaking new records in our testing, and the maximum thermal reading of 49c when gaming is one of the best results we have ever seen in our labs. For those people building a system in a new, space restricted HTPC chassis, power demand, noise and heat output are critical areas to take into consideration.
While every sample will exhibit varying levels of core headroom, the MSI sample we received for review was remarkable. We managed to maximise the sliders in MSI Afterburner, hitting a peak of 1,220mhz. This helped to drive performance past the reference clocked HD7850, a highly capable solution which requires additional juice from a single 6 pin PCI e power connector.
I have been extremely impressed with the MSI GTX750 TI OC Twin Frozr graphics card. While it struggles to match the AMD R7 265 at 1080p, The new Nvidia Maxwell design is undoubtedly a great step forward in regards to dropping power demand, noise and heat output. When it comes to frame rate performance, when overclocked, the GTX750Ti OC manages to outclass the reference clocked HD7850, while consuming almost half the power.
If you are in the market for a new budget graphics card with a primary focus on reducing power demand, heat output and noise emissions, then the MSI GTX750 Ti OC Twin Frozr should be right at the top of your shortlist.
Nvidia have said the GTX750 Ti will be priced around £115 inc vat when it is released.
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Pros:
- Maxwell is a breakthrough in power consumption.
- extremely quiet running.
- good frame rate performance.
- exceptionally cool running.
- no need for PCIe power connectors.
- not a rebadged card from 2 years ago.
- massive overclocking headroom.
Cons:
- AMD's R7 265 is cheaper, and has greater frame rate performance.
- MSI could have clocked the core much higher.
Kitguru says: Maxwell is a performance per watt breakthrough.
Where is the image in the background of your benchmark results from?
Nvidia’s new dawn demo.