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When deciding on a high end GPU there are two obvious options in the market at the moment, the GTX 770 and Radeon 7970 GHz Edition. Both offer a level of performance which will suit a decent budget but there is always that bit of doubt around what that bit of extra cash might get us. Today we look to answer that as we take an overclocked GTX 770 and 7970 GHz for a spin and compare them to an overclocked GTX 780 "Super JetStream" from Palit. Does that step up give us enough reason to stretch the budget and what will the GTX 780 give us in some of the latest games like Crysis 3, Grid 2 and Bioshock Infinite?
Overclocking is a big part of the enthusiast community so we tend to look for special products designed to help us reach our goals without having to resort to extensive board modifications.
Graphic cards
The MSI GTX 780 Lightning graphics card is the newest offering, targeted at achieving the highest overclocks possible. The MSI GTX 780 Lightning offers a graphics card with the GK110 GPU at its core, with MSI's TriFrozr Thermal design. The TriFrozr design offers a cooling solution with three PWM fans that can be independently controlled. The architecture also includes an all-digital PWM control and triple level signals to show load using different colors. The overclocking features don't stop there. Two separate BIOS chips are present on the 10 layer PCB. One is tuned for gaming performance out of the box, while the other is specifically tuned and unlocked for LN2 overclocking. In addition the card has 16 GPU phases of power and three memory phases, and the ability to add a "GPU Reactor" behind the GPU for more overclocking stability. The GPU reactor is designed to offer up to 300% more power capacity and to stabilize power noise. The Lightning card doesn't skimp on quality either utilizing MSI's Military class 4 components, consisting of DrMOS 4, CopperMOS, Hi-c CAP, Super Ferrite Core, and Dark Solid Caps.
When it comes to AMD graphics cards XFX are one of the biggest vendors by far and are known for their loyalty to AMD. XFX have been a big player with AMD graphics cards since I can remember - which is probably around the early days of the HD 4000 series, though I am relatively young so some of you may remember their earlier cooperation with AMD. In terms of the HD 7000 series as of late the XFX style of graphics card is becoming more popular as XFX's competitive pricing and excellent warranty service is giving them the cutting edge over some other AMD AIB partners.
Today we have with us a relatively unique card because at the time of writing there is no XFX website listing or any retailers currently selling the specific card we have. We have with us an XFX FX7850 Double Dissipation 2GB card that uses a special dual 10cm fan cooling solution. The part number of this unit is "FX-785A-CEF V2.V" or "FX-785A-CE" for shortened reference. We are pretty sure that this card is an extension of XFX's budget "Ghost" series of HD 7850 coolers, as this information is on the products serial sticker, but the dual 10cm fans give it a more premium design that make it a bit more high end than the current XFX Ghost branded HD 7850s. While the card runs at stock clocks it does have a rather special feel to it that oozes from both the card and the bundle it comes with.
As you may already know AMD's new series of graphics cards are officially launched today and we have here for you the AMD Radeon R9 270X review, but we've also checked out the R9 280X and R7 260X of which you can see reviews of both on our site's main homepage, or by searching in the search bar if you're reading this some time after publication. We have managed to get our hands on a reference AMD R9 270X, a card which is essentially an overclocked HD 7870 brought to market at a lower price point than the HD 7870 originally was.
The specifications can be seen below and a clock speed of 1050MHz on the core and 5600MHz on the memory is a fair bit higher than the 1000MHz and 4800MHz the AMD HD 7870 offered. The higher clock speeds mean the R9 270X is capable of 2.69 TFLOPS over the 2.56 TFLOPS offered by the HD 7870. Like with all new AMD RX-2XX series graphics cards there is Direct X 11.2 support, OpenGL 4.3 support and support for AMD's new API mantle. AMD have opted for a price point of $199 MSRP for the R9 270X meaning it is actually priced roughly the same as the HD 7870 currently is (the HD 7870 is currently priced to clear so stocks won't last long) but when the HD 7870 originally came to market it retailed for $349 - so this is $149 cheaper.
It is a busy week for AMD partners as they release a slew of new graphics cards vying for sales. In this review we look at the high end Asus R9 280X Matrix Platinum which features a heavily customised three slot cooler and impressive out of the box overclock. Is this the card that you want next for a system upgrade?
Over the past few days AMD have released their latest range of GPUs, the R9 and R7 200 series. We took a look at some of the mainstream and enthusiast models earlier in the week and today we focus on one of the budget/entry level models, the R7 250 based on AMDs Oland GPU and retailing for around £69/$90. Running on Windows 8.1 we will find out what the card can do in the likes of Battlefield 4, F1 2013 and Total War: Rome 2. Can we play the latest games on a low cost GPU? Lets get started...
We step away from the new R Series video cards from AMD for a moment and check out the GTX 780 Lightning from MSI.
The new R9 270X implementation from HIS comes with a custom PCB, an award-winning cooling system which is very efficient while keeping the noise down and is also pre-overclocked. The card trades punches with the GTX 760 and succeeds to surpass it in some games which are heavily AMD optimized.
AMD have been taking all the headlines in the last month, releasing a slew of graphics cards – including the class leading (but noisy) R9 290 and R9 290X. The R9 290X managed to take the performance crown from Nvidia’s GTX 780 and GTX Titan in the ultra high end at both 1600p and Ultra HD 4K resolutions. Nvidia have been hard at work behind the scenes however and today they release their new GTX780 Ti. The big question we need to answer … is it enough to push the formidable R9 290X into second place?
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