There comes a time in

the life of every PC gamer when you say to yourself: “Self, I’d like to buy a graphics card with more than twice the shader power of a PlayStation 4 for less money.” Then you fire up a web browser, read our review of the GeForce GTX 970 , and realize you can have what you want. Because that’s how life as a PC gamer works.

Later, around Christmastime, I’ll tell you the one about wanting to buy major AAA games for five to ten bucks, opening up Steam, and getting to take your pick.

Or the one about getting a vastly more powerful CPU than the consoles’ for $72.

It’s good to be a PC gamer, is what I’m saying.

But if you’re going to be forking over less than price of an Xbox One for more than three times the GPU power—that is, if you’re you’re planning to buy a GeForce GTX 970—you may still be vexed by questions. Like, “Which one of these excellent video cards at an amazing price is the best one to get?”

These are tough choices, in the sense that choosing can be difficult. In every other sense, they’re really easy, because it’s hard to go wrong and, at the end, you’ll be doing butt stomps on Elpis with fluid, stunning visuals.

In that context, my happy task is to guide you through some of your options. Today, that means sussing out the differences between a pair of hopped-up GeForce GTX 970 cards: the Asus Strix GTX 970 and the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G. The two cards are incredibly similar on paper, but they’re more different than you might think in actual use. Let’s get down to it.

Asus’ Strix GeForce GTX 970

Asus’ Strix GTX 970 may be familiar to you from our initial review of the GeForce GTX 970. The Strix is ostensibly a premium card with a higher price and faster clock speeds than the “standard” GTX 970. Trouble is, the idea of a “baseline” GTX 970 is a bit of a convenient fiction. You see, Nvidia didn’t produce any reference boards for the GTX 970, so cards like the Strix are some of the earliest implementations.

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) Memory capacity GDDR5 transfer rate Aux power ports Length Price GeForce GTX 970 stock 1050 1174 4 GB 7 GT/s – – $329 Asus Strix GTX 970 1114 1253 4 GB 7 GT/s 1 x 8-pin 11.125″ $349

The Strix offers somewhat higher base and boost GPU clock frequencies than Nvidia requires, and it sells for a little bit more than Nvidia’s suggested retail price. Asus quotes a list of $339, but Newegg is asking $349 for the Strix right now—if you can find one in stock. They’re a bit of a hot item.

Aside from the obvious GPU value, one of the Strix’s main attractions is that handsome DirectCU II custom cooler. Asus’ press materials say it’s 30% cooler and “3X quieter” than . . . something. I’m not sure what. At any rate, it’s a big, dual-slot cooler with twin fans, triple heat pipes, and a metal shroud coated with flat-black paint.

Asus has made sure the cooler has lots of heatsink surface area by giving it ample dimensions. At over 11″, the Strix takes up more space than the GTX 980 reference design. Also, the cooler’s heatpipes protrude about an inch and a half vertically above the top of the PCIe expansion slot covers. Most modern PC cases of the mid-tower variety shouldn’t have any trouble swallowing this thing, but you’ll want to check the dimensions carefully if space is at a premium inside of your target enclosure.

Asus calls this cooler “DirectCU II” because it belongs to the second generation of Asus coolers whose copper heatpipes make direct contact with the top of the graphics chip. You can see from the leftover thermal paste above that all three pipes line up right above the GM204 die.

The “gray goo” thermal paste application on the Strix isn’t bad, either, although the layer of goo is a little thicker than absolutely necessary.

One of the best things about the Strix’s cooling isn’t apparent from pictures. This cooler is potent enough to keep the GM204 GPU from getting too warm at idle and during light gaming loads without spinning its fans at all. To capitalize on that fact, the Strix doesn’t spin up its fans until the GPU reaches a certain threshold temperature.

Asus made the unusual choice of including only a single eight-pin power input on the Strix 970. That plug should supply plenty to juice to drive the GPU and memory, and it’s certainly convenient during installation. However, not every power supply comes with an eight-pin PCIe power lead, so the Strix may require a dual-six-pin-to-single-eight-pin adapter.

Speaking of connectors, the Strix comes with a complement of display outputs that looks a bit old-school. Unlike Nvidia’s GTX 980 reference design, this card has only one DisplayPort ouput. There’s also a single HDMI port, and the other two outputs are DVI—one DVI-I and one DVI-D. Since 4K and G-Sync monitors tend to require DisplayPort, I’d rather see the trio of DisplayPort outputs that the 980 reference card offers. The inability to drive multiple 4K or G-Sync monitors may be the Strix’s biggest drawback, and it shares this trait with the MSI GTX 970 card. If you’d like more DisplayPort connectors, have a look at Gigabyte’s version of the GTX 970 instead.

No overview of a video card produced by a motherboard maker would be complete without some mention of high-quality electronic components. Asus says the Strix has been blessed with premium capacitors and chokes, and the card includes a Digi+ digital VRM chip for precise voltage modulation. The benefits, the firm claims, include higher durability and expanded overclocking potential.

Asus’ GPU Tweak software can help Strix owners tap that potential. GPU Tweak isn’t bad, as these sorts of utilities go. The most important tuning variables are exposed right up front, with very little nonsense.

I did run into a problem right out of the gate, though. I was testing the Strix with a 4K monitor and Windows 8.1 in a high-PPI scaling mode. The GPU Tweak app has relative font sizes, which resulted in a bunch of overly large lettering and overlap between words, mostly in the monitoring panel. I had to drop back to low-PPI settings, where icons are tiny and fonts are minuscule, in order to take the screenshot above.

Beyond that, the GPU Tweak apps shows you most of what you need to overclock a GM204. This isn’t the most verbose tweaking tool available, but it’s pretty straightforward to use.

There’s even a place to define a custom fan speed curve. As you can see, the Strix’s default policy doesn’t ask the fan to kick in until the GPU reaches about 60°C. Although there are only a few points defined on the curve above, you can click in the window to add more. Pretty slick.

MSI’s GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) Memory capacity GDDR5 transfer rate Aux power ports Length Price GeForce GTX 970 stock 1050 1174 4 GB 7 GT/s – – $329 MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G 1114 1253 4 GB 7 GT/s 6 + 8-pin 10.5″ $349

At first blush, MSI’s GTX 970 Gaming 4G looks very similar to the Strix, right down to sharing the same base and boost GPU clocks. Some of the differences are fairly obvious, since they have to do with the Gaming 4G’s cooling and cosmetic look. Compared to the Strix, MSI’s fifth-generation Twin Frozer V cooler is shorter and more compact, but like the Asus, it juts up about 1.5″ above the top of the PCIe slot cover.

That extra height creates clearance for a pair of 100-mm fans that are larger and sport more blades than the ones on the Strix’s cooler. MSI says these fans are independently controlled, which is possibly a good thing, although I’m not clear on how much that fact matters when they’re both removing heat from a common source.

More notably, the Gaming 4G’s fan policy is similar to the Asus card’s. Those blades don’t spin until the GPU hits a certain temperature. Much of the time, they’re just sitting still.

The shroud on the Gaming 4G’s cooler is plastic, not metal, but it makes up for cheaper materials with a little bling: an illuminated MSI logo and dragon. This is a positively restrained touch compared to most blinkenlights implementations, and I really like it.

The Twin Frozr V cooler sports one more heatpipe than the Asus cooler, and all four pipes are routed through a metal block that sits on top of the GPU. The pipes may not touch the GPU directly, but that metal block ought to do a reasonable job of transferring heat. MSI includes a black metal plate beneath the cooler that’s apparently intended to help dissipate heat from the GDDR5 memory chips on this side of the board.

You can see the Gaming 4G’s VRM layout in the shot above. MSI also uses high-quality components like super ferrite chokes, only it claims these components are “military class.”

I dunno about that, but MSI’s thermal paste application is pretty much textbook. I’m not quite sure what variety of goo this is, but it’s not the basic white paste you might think you’re seeing in the pictures. (Basic white paste is my weapon of choice.) This stuff hardens into a mostly solid veneer. I’m amazed how precise MSI’s application is compared to what you’ll see in most consumer hardware.

The Gaming 4G has been blessed with more input power than it should ever need, thanks to an eight-plus-six-pin input arrangement. Like Asus, MSI has taken to rotating its power connectors 180 degrees and putting the retention tabs in cutouts on the PCB. This setup makes the tabs more accessible for removal, and it saves a couple of millimeters worth of space that can be used for heatsink fins, instead. This layout is apparently becoming a new standard of sorts, and I’m all for it.

MSI ships the Gaming 4G with a “Gaming” app that includes some overclocking controls and a few other features. I’m just happy to see that it’s named “Gaming,” as is the video card itself—and this Gigabyte GTX 980, also. Because remember, kids: if it doesn’t say “Gaming” on the box, it can only be used for spreadsheets.

Really cool 3D spreadsheets, maybe, but that’s the limit.

Anyhow, I have to admit that I didn’t even try the Gaming app, because MSI also offers the granddaddy of all GPU overclocking utilities, Afterburner.

Afterburner has been around for ages, and I’ve used it to overclock a number of video cards from MSI and from other brands whose own apps leave much to be desired. The main interface, shown above, offers a basic suite of controls and monitoring tools. Behind the tabs in the settings menus, though, is where Afterburner really excels. You can tweak just about anything.

Crucially for overclocking, Afterburner exposes the internal reasons (as either a 1 or 0) why Nvidia’s GPU Boost algorithm is limiting clock speeds. You can know whether the GPU is being held back by a power limit, a thermal limit, its peak voltage, or something else. Keeping track of these limits is the key to unlocking higher frequencies.

Afterburner exposes control over fan speed curves, as well.

In fact, my only beef with Afterburner has to do with control sliders. They’re too sensitive, especially the one for GPU clock speeds. Perhaps this is more of an issue in high-PPI display modes. I’m not sure.

I can complain about anything, though, and Afterburner is the GPU overclocking utility least deserving of complaints. So yeah. Let’s move on.

Performance

We can get a quick assessment of the performance differences between these cards by using the built-in benchmark from Thief, which spits out a simple FPS average. If you want the full-on inside-the-second performance treatment, please go read my initial GeForce GTX 980 review. By the way, our test system config for this article was the same as the one we used for that review.

You may recall that the Asus and MSI cards have the exact same base and boost clock speeds. Given that fact, there’s way more drama in the performance results above than one would expect. Why is that?

To find out, I fired up a GPU monitoring utility on each card and ran MSI’s Kombustor GPU burn-in tool. Here’s what I saw from the two cards while they were cranking away in Kombustor:

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) Memory clock (MHz) Kombustor GPU voltage Kombustor GPU clock (MHz) Asus Strix GTX 970 1114 1253 7010 1.173 1278 MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G 1114 1253 7012 1.200 1342

Turns out the Gaming 4G supplies a little more voltage to the GM204 GPU, and as a result, it achieves higher clock speeds during normal operation. That’s Nvidia’s GPU Boost algorithm at work—and MSI taking advantage of it. This is not a temperature-related difference. Both cards level out at about 67°C in Kombustor, well below their defined thermal limits.

The Gaming 4G is only a few FPS faster than the Asus, so I wouldn’t get too worked up over this outcome. Still, the Gaming 4G is also only a few FPS slower than a reference GTX 980. Not too shabby for the price.

Overclocking

I took the same basic approach to overclocking these GTX 970 cards that I used earlier with these GTX 980s. As before, I used the overclocking software supplied with each card to tweak it. As I raised clock speeds and voltages, I ran the Kombustor GPU burn-in utility and checked for three things:

Stability — Does it crash?

Visual artifacts — Do Kombustor’s images render correctly?

Delivered speeds — Does turning up the slider actually mean increased clock frequencies?

Here are the best settings I was able to achieve with each card.

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) Memory clock (MHz) Kombustor GPU voltage Kombustor GPU clock (MHz) Asus Strix GTX 970 OC – 1440 7800 1.173 1465 MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G OC 1260 – 8002 1.218 1500

The MSI card proved to be a more willing overclocker, and it all comes down to voltage. The Asus card’s peak voltage didn’t budge from its 1.173V default level, despite my best efforts. The Gaming 4G started at a higher voltage level and was willing to bump up a little bit from there. At 1.218V, the Gaming 4G ran steadily at an even 1.5GHz.

That said, the Strix proved stable at 1465MHz in Kombustor, which is almost 200MHz faster than its stock speeds.

The one thing that surprised me most here was the fact that the Strix’s GDDR5 memory wasn’t happy at 8GHz. All four of the other GM204 cards I’ve tried have been happy at around that speed, but the Asus 970 was not. Of course, memory chips tend to be a luck-of-the-draw kind of thing. Not all of them will overclock well. The same is true for GPUs.

Yep, the overclocked Strix 970 exactly matches the performance of a stock-clocked GTX 980, and the tweaked-up MSI 970 is a smidgen faster than that. Let that sink in for a moment.

Power consumption

Please note that our “under load” tests aren’t conducted in an absolute peak scenario. Instead, we have the cards running a real game, Crysis 3, in order to show us power draw with a more typical workload.

The Gaming 4G runs at higher voltage, so naturally, it draws more power than the Strix. I’m having a hard time worrying about that fact, though, since the overclocked Gaming 4G system still draws 30W less under load than the same system with a Radeon R9 290X. The overclocked Gaming 4G should generally be faster than the Radeon, too.

Noise levels and GPU temperatures

We generally provide noise level readings when the system is idle, just like we did with power above. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it here, though, since both the MSI and Asus cards simply turn their fans off at idle and emit zero noise. Any readings I could give you from my sound level meter would reflect only the ambient noise in the environment.

Yes, these are noise levels while running a game, and they’re not too far from the noise floor in Damage Labs. Both of these GTX 970 cards are exceptionally quiet under load. Overclocking the cards increases the burden on these coolers, but they’re still no louder than a whisper.

The temperature readings for these cards round out the picture, and they show both of these coolers to be tremendously effective. Temperatures this low are a luxury in the GPU space, but both cards seem to be able to afford it.

The recent arms race in cooler designs between video card companies has led us to this happy state of affairs. You can overclock a GTX 970 to match the performance of a GTX 980 reference card, and the aftermarket GTX 970 will still be quieter.

For what it’s worth, we should acknowledge that MSI’s Twin Frozr V cooler looks to be a little more effective than the Asus DirectCU II, overall. The MSI card draws more power than the Asus at stock speeds, yet the Gaming 4G produces less noise under load and maintains the same GPU core temperature.

One more thing: I’ve heard reports of problems with “coil whine” from some GeForce GTX 970 cards. I’m happy to say that neither of these two cards has any problems on this front. I didn’t notice anything unusual, and any really egregious noises would show up on our sound level meter readings. Obviously, that didn’t happen, since these cards were among the quietest we’ve tested.

Conclusions

When I started to write this review, the narrative was set. My take was essentially this. The Asus Strix GTX 970 is a fantastic product at a killer price. MSI’s Gaming 4G GTX 970 is a little bit better, though, in a range of ways, and it costs about $20 more to buy. Take your pick from them.

Asus Strix GTX 970 October 2014

Then MSI informed me that it had dropped the price on the Gaming 4G to match the competition. Sure enough, the Asus Strix GTX is going for $349 at Newegg, and the Gaming 4G is listed for the exact same price.

That certainly clarifies things.

As I said earlier, there are no bad choices here. The Asus Strix GTX 970 is among the finest video cards we’ve ever reviewed. It’s fast, quiet, and an exceptional value for the money. And it requires only a single eight-pin power input. That’s probably why the Strix is backordered six ways from Sunday. If you can somehow manage to get your hands on one, I’d encourage you to do so. In fact, I’m happy to give it a TR Recommended award.

MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G October 2014

That said, if you somehow are presented with the choice between the Strix 970 and MSI’s GTX 970 Gaming 4G, then I’d give the nod to the Gaming 4G. Although the Asus Strix is incredibly refined, MSI has managed to outdo it slightly in several important ways. The Gaming 4G is faster at stock speeds, and it has more voltage headroom, which translates into higher GPU clock speeds—and higher performance.

Yes, the Gaming 4G draws more power than the Strix, but MSI’s Twin Frozr V cooler keeps the Gaming 4G running just as cool as its rival at comparable or lower noise levels.

This is an incredibly close contest, but after spending some time with both cards, I’m convinced the MSI Gaming 4G has the edge. That’s why I giving it our Editor’s Choice award. This is the card to get—if you can find one in stock.

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