The ASUS GTX 980 STRIX OC is the company's latest flagship, featuring a completely passive operation in idle and light load and an extremely quiet cooler during full-on gaming. The GTX 980 STRIX also impresses with its power consumption - lower than the NVIDIA reference design, it still has the card deliver more performance.
MSI's latest flagship is the GTX 980 Gaming. It delivers a super quiet gaming experience thanks to a powerful thermal solution and a well-crafted fan profile. In idle and light gaming, the fans will even stop completely. MSI has also overclocked their card out of the box, which yields around 10% extra performance.
Palit's GTX 970 JetStream is one of the highest-clocked, custom design GTX 970s out there. It features a triple-slot, dual-fan cooler that will completely stop the fans in idle and light gaming. Palit's card is also the most affordable custom design, with just a $15 price premium.
Today, NVIDIA releases their new GeForce GTX 980, which brings the Maxwell architecture to the high-end. It features massive power efficiency improvements and reduced noise, but also beats the GTX 780 Ti in raw performance. Pricing is quite acceptable, too, with an MSRP of $549.
ASUS just released their GeForce Strix GTX 970 OC, an overclocked version of the GTX 970 with its own custom-PCB. What is special about the STRIX technology is that it will shut off the fans completely during idle, media playback, and light gaming, resulting in a completely noiseless experience.
EVGA's brand-new GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX uses the company's latest ACX cooler, which promises to improve its noise and temperatures over the reference design. It is also overclocked out of the box for that little bit of extra performance it needs to beat the Radeon R9 290X.
Palit's GeForce GTX 750 Ti KalmX is the first completely fanless NVIDIA graphics card in a long time to offers performance that doesn't suck. Thanks to its fanless design, there is no noise from the card itself, which is important for media PC systems or quiet office PCs.
PowerColor's R9 290X PCS+ uses a large triple-fan, triple-slot cooler, which promises improved temperatures and noise levels over the AMD reference design. The card is also overclocked out of the box by +50 MHz GPU and +100 MHz memory, making it the highest-clocked R9 290X available today.
Palit's new GTX 750 Ti StormX Dual comes with the fantastic power consumption improvements of the Maxwell architecture, but also includes a large overclock out of the box. Additional overclocking potential is also excellent, making this the card you want if you are after maximized performance.
Sapphire's custom design R9 290X Tri-X OC impresses with low noise levels that still run the card at cool temperatures. The card is also overclocked out of the box, which makes it faster than the GTX Titan. In Europe, the price over reference is just 10%, which makes the choice a no-brainer.
The MSI GTX 760 Mini-ITX Gaming should definitely be on your short list if you are looking to build a SFF gaming PC or compact Steam Box. It runs quieter than any other compact graphics card we ever tested, yet still has enough power to play all the latest titles at full HD, with maximized settings.
The ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC is R9 290X done right. It is overclocked out of the box, but doesn't suffer from the throttling issues of AMD's reference design. The card is also quieter, even in performance mode, and you can activate the second, quiet BIOS for a very low noise experience.
EVGA's GTX 780 Ti Classified is the fastest GTX 780 Ti we ever tested. It comes with a large overclock out of the box that makes it run above 1175 MHz most of the time. The dual-fan ACX heatsink also provides good cooling, resulting in low temperatures and a stable operation at all times.
MSI's GeForce GTX 780 Ti is the best graphics card I've reviewed in a long time. It is very fast because of its overclock out of the box, but doesn't run hot at all. Its powerful TwinFrozr cooler also enables MSI to run the card at fantastic noise levels that are quieter than most other graphics cards on the market.
The new ASUS GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC offers amazing performance out of the box that is 6% higher than the already fast GTX 780 Ti reference design. ASUS is also using their large dual-fan DirectCU II heatsink to ensure that the card runs cool enough for maximized performance.
MSI's R9 270X GAMING provides the lowest noise levels of any card in its performance class thanks to its dual-fan TwinFrozr cooler. It is also overclocked out of the box, giving it a 3% performance advantage, which matches HD 7950 performance.
PowerColor's R9 270X PCS+ comes overclocked out of the box and introduces a completely new cooler design. In our testing, the card delivers good temperature and noise levels. With a price of $200, it's also the cheapest R9 270X available at this time.
Last week, AMD released their R9 270 Non-X, which is built on the same Pitcairn GPU as the HD 7800 Series before. Unlike the HD 7850, it comes with all its shaders enabled, though. The ASUS R9 270 Direct CU II OC improves on that with a better cooler and overclock out of the box.
EVGA strapped their ACX cooler onto the GTX 780 Ti just days after NVIDIA's launch. The new card is also overclocked out of the box, which results in a large performance increase over the stock GTX 780 Ti - EVGA's latest card now even matches the performance of the dual-GPU GTX 690.
NVIDIA's new GTX 780 Ti uses a full GK110 GPU with 2880 shaders. This enables impressive performance that is 10% faster than the GTX Titan / R9 290X. The card also comes with massive overclocking potential that let us overclock GPU frequency by almost 30%.
AMD is launching their new Radeon R9 290 today. It comes with slightly weaker specifications than the R9 290X, but can compete with its bigger brother in benchmarks. Thanks to the fantastic price of just $399, the card is also extremely affordable.
PowerColor's Radeon R9 290X is built on AMD's reference design.Using a 30 MHz overclock on the GPU and coming at reference design pricing, the decision whether this card is worth the money is really a no-brainer.
AMD's new Radeon R9 290X launches today. Based on a new Hawaii GPU, the card promises record-breaking performance. Not only performance is impressive: With a price of $549, it's also the most affordable high-performance option, which will certainly put massive pressure on NVIDIA.
MSI uses the same cooler as on their R9 280X cards on the R9 270X HAWK, which leaves the HAWK with a cooler that has lots of power to spare, resulting in amazing noise levels at reasonable temperatures. The card is also overclocked out of the box for a nice performance boost.
ASUS is using a completely revamped PCB design and the cooler from their GeForce GTX 780 DC II on their latest R9 280X card. The card also comes overclocked out of the box with an overclock on both memory and GPU, which provides a serious performance advantage over the reference design.
