A couple of weeks ago the first Gigabyte GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards hit the Australian market and were promptly added to our custom PC builder options the moment stock arrived. This week we welcome 4 more options for high end custom gaming PCs in the form of 1 more GTX 970 and 3 more GTX 980 cards.
MSI have introduced their GTX 980 and GTX 970 GAMING series each their well recognized TwinFrozr cooler, 4GB of memory and a factory overclock. With their non-reference coolers and factory overclock out of the box, these cards go head to head with Gigabyte’s G1 series.
The G1 series is branding move from Gigabyte with a slightly redesigned Windforce cooler over the 700 series of cards. Along with the redesign comes a pretty impressive factory overclock out of the box that edges out the MSI Gaming series.
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But with all that overclock, how do they actually perform? Well we did a bit of testing with Battlefield 4 and scoured the internet for corroborating data. Our results come from our i7 4770 powered test bench running 16gb of DDR3 1600MHz memory and a Samsung 840 EVO SSD. This is a very limited test but it gives you a rough idea of what to expect.
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With only a frame or two per second the difference between the two factory overclocked competitors, in both occasions, the Gigabyte G1 with its slightly higher clock speeds came ahead on top. In both cases we saw less than a 3% difference between the MSI and Gigabyte models and only a ~5% difference between the Gigabyte G1 and reference model card.
When factoring in the price difference between each model, at the time of this post, the reference cards are about 7% cheaper than the G1 and around 3% cheaper than the MSI Gaming series. In this case the added cost of the factory overclocked models does actually correlate pretty closely to added performance.
So to sum it all up, it’s pretty much as we suspected all along. Pay a little more for the G1 series and get a little more performance, if you want to save a little money and go with a reference card your not losing a great deal of performance.
It’s worth noting that all three of these cards can be overclocked further from their factory settings but your mileage will vary. If you’re planning on overclocking these GPUs yourself, we don’t suggest a reference model card, shell out a few more dollars and get a non-reference cooler which will help you squeeze out a few more FPS before the temperature throttle kicks in.
All of these cards are now available as options in all Nvidia powered custom gaming PCs on our website. If you have questions about this article, these new graphics ards or any other product or service we provide just shoot us an email to sales@evatech.com.au