Acoustics
The acoustic performance of a graphics card is an increasingly important consideration for PC users and Gamers these days. While fan noise is unlikely to ruin the gaming experience, no one likes a noisy graphics card and no one will argue with the fact that quieter is better. Many users are willing to sacrifice temperatures to gain a noise advantage, but with better cooling solutions being developed it is increasingly common to be able to get both better cooling and better acoustic performance than a reference solution on most custom cooled graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD partners. That said both AMD and Nvidia have stepped up their game too with regards to acoustics on their reference coolers. Ultimately, acoustics will always be a big deciding factor when there is often very little differentiation between graphics cards using the same GPUs.
Find details of our acoustic methodology on page 3.
It’s a bit odd that both the msi gtx 760 and 770 gaming struggled to overclock on the core but we’re the best at VRAM overclocking. In other reviews of both cards I have seen them go much higher on the core so you must either be really unlucky or there is something odd going on at MSIs end with binning. Just out of interest are these samples sent direct from MSI or did you buy them from retail?
Quite honestly i’m not really sure. We had no trouble with any other GTX 760s (Gainward Phantom, Gigabyte WindForce) they all overclocked well and as expected. These samples were sent direct from MSI so i’m not sure what’s going on. We tried multiple OC programs (afterburner, precision X, etc) and all returned similar results.
I guess you must just be very unlucky then…
I just got hold of a MSI GTX 770 Gaming edition card and it went to 1250 MHz core and 8000 MHz VRAM no problem and runs around 66 degrees in Arma 3 which is a very graphic intensive game so I guess it really must have been bad luck that you couldn’t overclock more.
I’m also only able to OC the GPU 100 mhz. The memory, though, has a lot of headroom. Currently, using Afterburner, I’m at 1120mzh core-1185mhz boost for the GPU and 1752mhz memory as shown in GPU-Z. All other reviews’s I’ve seen are able to push the GPU much further, so it’s nice that this review matches my machine, punch for punch. I’m just opting to leave the memory OC a little lower for stability/longevity/low maintenance, etc.
Thanks for sharing. I’m glad to see someone else had the same experience as me as like you said most other reviewers ended up with much better results!
Thank you for the article
I got mine core clock boost to 1215mhz and memory 1885mhz