A worthy Successor to the GTX970, for 2/3's of the price!
Pros:
-Looks amazing!
-Very quiet, while still offering fantastic cooling performance. MSI have really showed their years of experience with the Twin Frozer design
-Over-clocks well, with MSI Afterburner offering a good amount of control over the card (having complete control will require a custom VBIOS, but most people won't need that)
-Metal back-plate looks great and helps dissipate heat as well as add rigidity so the card won't sag since the heat-sink is decently heavy
-Great performance! The jump to GDDR6 memory made a huge difference, and I have run the most memory heavy game I have (Nier: Automata with Hi-res textures) and it takes it like a champ and doesn't hit the memory limit! I am beating GTX1070's with my setup ^_^
-Uses very little power, even when recording
-Has a built in hardware encoder so you don't incur extra CPU usage while recording and gaming intensively. I haven't tested this much since I am not a youtuber/streamer but I do some video editing once in a while and it is a nice feature
Cons:
-More expensive than the base price of the card. You get what you pay for in my opinion, but it is not the ultra budget option (EVGA has a nice card that is 40-60 USD cheaper)
-The RGB lighting is nice, but I don't have any other lighting so it looks a bit off. You can install a program to control it, but I don't want to bloat my system with a bunch of other services
-GPU Boost 3.0 is great, and automatically over-clocks for you (I got 1920 MHZ without touching the frequency controls) but it also throttles your card artificially because MSI doesn't want it to perform better than their higher tier cards. Use the auto over-clocking in afterburner as a suggestion and manually overclock the card to avoid this. I hit 2075 Mhz for the core and 7500 Mhz for the memory, and that is extremely conservative
-MSI put restrictions on how hard push the overclock to prevent stupid people (like I was with my GTX970) from breaking their cards. You can remove this with a custom VBIOS, but I don't recommend it and for most people it will not be an issue
TL;DR
Great performance, 6 gigabytes of VRAM, very quiet and very cool looking. Worth the 280 USD I spent for it!
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