David Nicholson: MSI GTX 780 Ti review

Friday, December 20, 2013

MSI GTX 780 Ti review

MSI releases its version of the GTX 780 Ti which includes the super efficient TwinFrozr fan.

*Almost a month after Nvidia released the GTX 780 Ti, manufacturers are launching their own versions of the card. Depending on the manufacturer, the card will be tweaked in different ways.

MSI has chosen to tweak its GTX 780 Ti with a mighty TwinFrozr cooler, on top of adding in more memory as well as a slight increase in core and clock frequencies.

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*The GTX 780 Ti has a base frequency of 1020 Mhz, with a boost frequency of 1085 MHz, 3GB of DDR5 memory with a 384-bit wide bus which runs at 7.0 Ghz. The TwinFrozr cooler has two 10 cm fans that serve five 8+6+6+6+8 heat pipes, keeping the card nice and cool even under the heaviest loads.

*For benchmarking, we placed MSI’s GTX 780 Ti against EVGA’s superclocked version of the card with an ACX cooler.

*As you can see below, with a few exceptions MSI’s card has a single digit performance edge over EVGA’s version.

*The notable exceptions are with the minimum frame rates in Metro 2033 and Bioshock Infinite. This may to do with the required warm up times for cards, an issue that AMD seems to grapple with more than Nvidia.

It should be noted that while MSI’s GTX 780 Ti ran slightly hotter than its EVGA counterpart, the cooler on MSI’s card is more efficient as its much quieter and is barely noticeable audibly.

Testing with Furmark shows that MSI’s card comes out slightly higher than the EVGA card, by 26 Mhz.

EVGA:

MSI:

All in all, MSI has done a great job with the MSI GTX 780 Ti Gaming OC Edition. Its clock speed and RAM are more than enough to make light work of any game, and the included TwinFrozr cooler is more efficient than the competition’s. For that, we give the card 8.5/10 with a strong recommend to buy.