MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G Review

Power consumption in the desktop enthusiast sector has been rising for some time, so when I got my first hands on with the Maxwell architecture earlier this year I felt it was a huge step forward for Nvidia …  and the marketplace as a whole. I was fascinated to see that when the GTX750 ti was overclocked it could keep up with AMD's HD7850 – while consuming half the power under load and getting all the juice it needed direct from the PCI e slot. No additional PCI e connectors needed.

At the time we were interested to see how Nvidia would evolve the new Maxwell architecture into more expensive and powerful solutions.

If you have been reading our launch reviews today you will have already studied our findings from testing the reference Nvidia GTX980 graphics card. In the £400-£500 sector this product really has no challengers. Nvidia's GTX780Ti was already the market leader and the GTX980 takes things a stage further by delivering more performance with a drop in power demands and heat output. The immense overclocking headroom ensures the GTX980 pulls away from overclocked GTX780Ti solutions.

Even though Nvidia have launched the GTX980 today at a lower £430 starting point than the GTX780 ti before it, the price will still prove too prohibitive for most. This is why the GTX970 has been launched today … it is designed for the mass gaming audience who can budget up to £300 for a new upgrade.

Nvidia have launched the reference GTX970 at £259.99 inc vat in the United Kingdom. When overclocked the GTX970 will outperform preoverclocked AMD R9 290X solutions – which can often cost close to £400 inc vat. Nvidia have a reputation for relatively ‘high pricing' so it is quite remarkable that many of the overclocked, custom solutions such as the MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G reviewed today will be available for only £274.99 inc vat.

The MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G comes very highly recommended by KitGuru. The Twin Frozr 5 Hybrid cooler is very efficient, and the fans will only spin when the GPU is tasked to power a game. When watching a movie, or browsing the net the fans will deactivate for complete silence. This is only possible due to the cool running Maxwell architecture which ensures the cooler never has to work too hard, even under heavily loaded situations.

MSI have built their GTX 970 Gaming 4G to very high standards, using new 100mm Torx fans which are designed to increase airflow while reducing turbulence and noise. We could overclock the GTX970 Gaming 4G beyond a 1,400mhz Boost clock speed which places performance levels above an overclocked Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC and even past the Asus GTX780Ti Direct CU II OC which we retested for this review today. We don't have a reference GTX970 at hand, but we would imagine this card will also overclock  well – particularly if the reference GTX980 is anything to go by.

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Pros:

• one of the prettiest looking graphics cards we have seen.
• preoverclocked.
• low power demand.
• runs cool.
• fans disable below 50c.
• massive additional overclocking headroom.
• £275 inc vat – a new price to performance ratio leader.
• 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

Cons:

• could have been clocked much higher out of the box without compromising stability under load.
• doesn't need an 8 pin and a 6 pin power connector.

Kitguru says: The MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G is a looker. They say beauty is only skin deep, but this overclocked GTX970 has bags of performance and massive potential for overclocking well past the ‘out of box speeds'. Right now AMD have nothing to come close.

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