MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4 GB Review

Name: MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4 GB
Brand: MSI

W1zzard

on Dec 17th, 2014,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

(48 Comments) »

Introduction

The GeForce GTX 970 is the smaller brother to NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 980, of which both are based on the Maxwell architecture using the GM204 graphics processor. The GTX 970, much like its predecessors, the GTX 770 and GTX 670, is destined to be an underrated card decking out lower shelves under the GTX 980's shadow. Steam Hardware survey trends would also agree with our guess that this card will end up selling more between the two in volume to probably even fetch NVIDIA more revenue overall.

The GeForce GTX 970 is carved out of the 28 nm GM204 silicon the GTX 980 is based on, by disabling three of sixteen streaming multiprocessors with 128 CUDA cores each. The resulting shader count is 1,664. Texture memory units are, proportionately, down to 104, as are clock speeds, although they stay well above the 1 GHz mark. The ROP count stays at a whopping 64, with a 256-bit memory bus width and a standard memory total of 4 GB.

MSI is one of the leading players on the graphics card market, and their GTX 970 Gaming, reviewed today, has been available since NVIDIA's launch. We previously tested the MSI GTX 980 Gaming, and are today finally taking a look at the GTX 970 Gaming.

MSI's GTX 970 Gaming is a fully customized variant of the GTX 970 with a new dual-fan MSI TwinFrozr cooler and a custom board design with new voltage-regulation circuitry. The card is also overclocked to a base clock of 1114 MHz out of the box.

The card is currently available online for $350, which is a reasonable price as it is in-line with similar offerings.

GTX 970 Market Segment Analysis
	Radeon R9 280X	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	GeForce GTX 970	MSI GTX 970 Gaming	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon HD 7990	GeForce GTX Titan	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 980
Shader Units	2048	1536	2304	2560	1664	1664	2816	2x 2048	2688	2880	2048
ROPs	32	32	48	64	64	64	64	2x 32	48	48	64
Graphics Processor	Tahiti	GK104	GK110	Hawaii	GM204	GM204	Hawaii	2x Tahiti	GK110	GK110	GM204
Transistors	4310M	3500M	7100M	6200M	5200M	5200M	6200M	2x 4310M	7100M	7100M	5200M
Memory Size	3072 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	2x 3072 MB	6144 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	384 bit	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	256 bit	256 bit	512 bit	2x 384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1000 MHz	1006 MHz+	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1051 MHz+	1114 MHz+	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	837 MHz+	876 MHz+	1126 MHz+
Memory Clock	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz
Price	$205	$340	$350	$230	$330	$350	$310	$410	$1000	$400	$550

Packaging

Package Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + documentation
PCIe power cable
DVI adapter

The Card

MSI's card uses a red and black color theme that looks excellent thanks to its non-glossy colors. Dimensions of the card are 28.0 cm x 14.5 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.

You may combine up to three GTX 970 cards in a multi-GPU SLI configuration. AMD recently switched to transferring CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus in order to handle 4K frames. NVIDIA's SLI suffers from no such limitations, so there is no reason for NVIDIA to use PCIe.