MSI's GeForce GTX 770 TF Gaming is, unlike the MSI GTX 770 Lightning that is geared to meet the needs of enthusiast overclockers, optimized for typical gamers. While the Lightning comes with very high clocks out of the box, the TF Gaming is only mildly overclocked by 13 MHz (~1%). However, smart engineering by MSI has the card deliver a 3% real-life performance improvement over the NVIDIA reference design, as MSI made sure their card stays below 80°C during gaming, which staves off NVIDIA's additional performance throttling to keep temperatures down. I wish memory was overclocked too; at least a bit. Our manual OC testing shows that these new 7 Gbps GDDR5 chips have a ton of headroom.
We've seen MSI's TwinFrozr coolers on many cards over the years, and in many iterations. This latest design looks great thanks to the red highlights and the subtle MSI Gaming badge in the center. The cooler not only looks pretty, but provides excellent cooling performance that is optimized for low noise output. Our testing sees noise levels that are much better than any other GTX 770 we tested so far. The card is nearly inaudible in idle and increases fan speed just enough to keep the card below 80°C while emitting as little noise as possible. I've been preaching it for years: low noise sells your products. On Newegg, eight out of eleven comments positively report on the low noise experiences provided by the MSI GTX 770 TF Gaming. However, given that the card runs right at the edge of the 80°C temperature limit, increasing temperature headroom by just 1 or 2°C to ensure maximum performance in even badly ventilated cases might have been an option. That said, I would have personally designed the fan settings exactly the way they are right now.
While overclocking is not the main focus of the MSI GTX 770 Gaming, the card does fine here too. It reaches clocks similar to what we've seen on other custom GTX 770 cards. MSI's Lightning does a bit better here, but each card is different, so that might just be due to random variation.
What I really like is that the GTX 770 Gaming comes at no price premium over the reference design. It currently retails for $399, which makes it very attractive to value-oriented buyers (if you can say that about a $400 graphics card). Overall, the card delivers the best GTX 770 experience--in my opinion. If you gave me 500 bucks to buy a graphics card, I would buy the MSI GTX 770 TF Gaming and party away the rest of the money.