MSI NVIDIA GTX 970 Gaming Twin Frozr HDMI DVI-I DP Graphics Card (4GB, PCI Express, DDR5, 256 Bit)

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The three DisplayPort outputs of the reference card are dispensed with in favour of the traditional dual-DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort arrangement, while curiously the six-pin/six-pin power inputs are replaced with an eight-pin/six-pin set-up. If you need the ultimate card for a compact gaming PC, the Asus GTX 970 DC Mini is the one to have; it’s much more expensive than the Sapphire R9 285 2GB GDDR5 ITX Compact Edition, but also much more powerful.

NVIDIA for the longest time has held to 2GB/3GB of memory for their cards, so it is a welcome sight to see that they are now making 4GB their standard, especially if they are going to target 4K gaming. As with the other GTX 970 cards, gaming at 2,560×1,440 is possible in the most demanding titles at sky-high detail levels, and 3,840×2,160 gaming is on the cards if you reduce detail levels slightly.This isn't a great result which indicates that there are much faster alternatives on the comparison list. Just tried it with nothing more than 150Mhz extra core clock, saw it boost to 1577, and stayed at 53c.

Actually I mainly need to do the upgrade because the power bills are so ridiculous for the 8800 GTX! The GTX 970 is based on Nvidia's ground-breaking Maxwell architecture which delivers considerable clock for clock performance gains over Kepler, its predecessor. FXAA at 1080p is rather ropey, but SMAA 4x is a lot nicer though it does struggle with sub-pixel detail.Compared to GTX 980, GTX 970 drops 3 of the SMMs, reducing its final count to 13 SMMs or 1664 CUDA cores. Gamer Network Limited, Gateway House, 28 The Quadrant, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1DN, United Kingdom, registered under company number 03882481.

As we have a big bunch of existing data sitting on our hard drive from our recent GPU testing, we actually have two comparisons for you here.In any case this 7GHz of GDDR5 is attached to a 256-bit memory bus, and is populated with 4GB of VRAM. The Maxwell architecture scales nicely though and energy consumption and heat levels are still lower than all of the last-gen cards. Extreme edition goes even further than the MSI and Asus cards, replacing the reference cooler with a massive three-fan system.