Temperatures

Temperatures are excellent. With the fans at a complete stop in idle (which is awesome), slightly higher idle temperatures are normal (and comparable to Palit and ASUS which also stop their fans).

During gaming, temperatures are better than on any other GTX 970 we have tested before, and since the MSI GTX 970 is also one of the quietest GTX 970s, its cooler is probably one of the best.

Important: GPU temperature will vary depending on clock speed, voltage settings,
cooler design, and production variances. This table just serves to provide
a list of typical temperatures for similar cards determined during TPU review.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.

The following table lists the clock settings for important performance scenarios and the GPU voltage we measured. We performed the measurement on the pins of a coil or a capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.

The card uses NVIDIA's dynamic overclocking mechanism, GPU Boost 2.0. It will dynamically adjust clock and voltage based on render load, temperature, and other factors.

For the graph below, we recorded all GPU clock and GPU voltage combinations of our 1920x1080 resolution benchmarking suite. The plotted points are transparent, which allows them to add up to indicate more often used values. A light color means the clock/voltage combination is rarely used and a dark color means it's active a lot.