EVGA GTX 750 Ti ACX FTW

We spent some time with three different retail GeForce GTX 750 Ti cards and they all have different characteristics.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti has been getting a lot of attention around the hardware circuits recently, but for good reason. It remains interesting from a technology stand point as it is the first, and still the only, Maxwell based GPU available for desktop users. It's a completely new architecture which is built with power efficiency (and Tegra) in mind. With it, the GTX 750 Ti was able to push a lot of performance into a very small power envelope while still maintaining some very high clock speeds.

NVIDIA’s flagship mainstream part is also still the leader when it comes to performance per dollar in this segment (for at least as long as it takes for AMD’s Radeon R7 265 to become widely available). There has been a few cases that we have noticed where the long standing shortages and price hikes from coin mining have dwindled, which is great news for gamers but may also be bad news for NVIDIA’s GPUs in some areas. Though, even if the R7 265 becomes available, the GTX 750 Ti remains the best card you can buy that doesn’t require a power connection. This puts it in a unique position for power limited upgrades.

After our initial review of the reference card, and then an interesting look at how the card can be used to upgrade an older or under powered PC, it is time to take a quick look at a set of three different retail cards that have made their way into the PC Perspective offices.

On the chopping block today we’ll look at the EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti ACX FTW, the Galaxy GTX 750 Ti GC and the PNY GTX 750 Ti XLR8 OC. All of them are non-reference, all of them are overclocked, but you’ll likely be surprised how they stack up.

The EVGA GTX 750 Ti ACX FTW

In the world of EVGA, the FTW label is bestowed to only the best of the best graphics cards they sell. The highest overclocks, the best coolers, etc. The GTX 750 Ti FTW with the EVGA ACX custom cooler is really no different.

This card is quite a bit larger than the reference design which subtracts a bit from the appeal for fitting into ultra-small cases and tight designs. The dual fans on the heatsink keep the GPU very cool at the cost of noise.

When we first got in the EVGA FTW model I complained about sound levels immediately to them and with that feedback they released an updated firmware that lowers the noise of the fans by a big step. The issue appears to be that EVGA chose to go with a non-PWM fan design on this card and as such the fan speed just can’t go any lower than the 42% we saw in our testing. What is kind of annoying about that is at stock settings, this card never goes ABOVE 42% fan speed under a full gaming workload. That means the card doesn’t increase in sound level while gaming (which seems good) but that it could easily be quieter at idle than EVGA decided to go with.

EVGA did include a 6-pin power connector on this model while also extending the heatsink past the PCB design in a very similar fashion to the GTX 660 cards from the previous generation.

External display options include a single dual-link DVI port, full size HDMI and full size DisplayPort. That should be plenty for a card that really isn’t designed for gaming on multiple panels and that doesn’t support multi-GPU SLI configurations.

For style points, the EVGA GT 750 Ti FTW has that in hand with a dark matte finish and a lack of any flashy, overly colorful components.

The out of box clock speeds for the EVGA card are set at 1189 MHz base clock, 1268 MHz Boost and 1350 MHz / 5.4 GHz on the memory bus. Those GPU clocks are 169 MHz higher than the reference speeds which should net a performance advantage of around 10%.

The EVGA GTX 750 Ti FTW is currently selling on Newegg.com for $179.