Well here we go with a mini review of the MSi 970 Gaming Edition 4G.
The card
Firstly let me just say that this is quite a hefty card, compared to my MSi 670 power edition the card is certainly quite a bit chunkier, as can be seen in these few images.
Sorry the images of the both ends seem to be corrupt for some reason and I'm not removing it again just to take more sorry.
Installation was a breeze as you would expect with a single card and there is plenty of room in my HAF932 case.
Yes I did have to resort to a bit of string to move the pump return pipe just so that it isn’t resting up against the end of the card.
Drivers
Driver installation wasn’t quite as smooth as it could have been. I was already using the 344.16 beta, so I thought a straight swap out shouldn’t have been a problem. But of course little did I know just how wrong I could be.
To start with everything booted up fine and windows started and immediately told me that it needed to install a driver for the new hardware found, with no option to cancel this I let it finish, thus presenting me with a nice 800x600 windows screen (super chunky vision). Ok i thought I’ll just reinstall the Nvidia drivers and all will be ok, yeah right.
This is the screen that greeted me when I tired.
Ok so something has not gone according to plan, I checked all the connections and everything was ok there, tried removing the display adapter from the device manager and it just reinstalled the basic windows driver. I re-downloaded the driver from Nvidia , same thing again. I thought what is the caches of getting two duff copies of the driver I will re-download it again, I head back to the Nvidia driver site and the 344-16 have been added as WHQL drivers rather than beta’s so I’ll try them. Bingo all worked as it should, a clean install and now I was good to go.
Now I did think to run some benchmarks on the 670 power edition before I removed it, then rerun the same benchmarks on the 970 at stock settings and then again after overclocking.
My rig is as follows
Intel i7 920 @4GHz water cooled
8Gb 1600Mhz @1528 dual channel
MSi 670 2Gb and MSi 970 4Gb GPU’s both air cooled
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R main board
Samsung 256 Gb SSD
A couple of HDD for storage one 1TB and one 640Gb
Asus Xonar PCI soundcard
Coolermaster Haf932 case
Benchmarks
Here are the results.
First up Fluid mark.
A marked improvement I’m sure you will agree right up until the overclocked result which I have run four times and it always comes out about the same and I have no idea why.
Anyway moving on next up heaven.
Definitely a improvement there with no funny business with the overclocked result either.
Next up valley
Some serious gains here as well.
3D mark next with Skydiver and then Firestrike
A good improvement all round, I assume it is normal for the overclocked score to not be that much better on these 3D mark benches.
As for actual gaming, at the moment the only game I have installed is World of tanks and in this at 1920*1200with everything turned up to the highest in game settings I have gone from minimums of 40 to minimums of 54 that I have seen in the few rounds that I have played so far.
Overclocking.
As you have seen in the above screen shots, the card clocked just as many other seem to have done with +200 on the core and +500 memory very easily, I get driver crashes with +250 and again with +230, so more fine tuning will be required to find the absolute maximum it can do without errors. Memory wise +550 gives a few sparkles in heaven so that might require more fine tuning as well, even though to be honest I am very happy with the card boosting to 1516 and staying there for an hour long heaven cycle. I have tried adding the +87mv and upping the power limit but it seemed to make no difference to when the driver crashes or sparklies occurred, so I have both the voltage and power limit at stock for now.
Noise
A lot of people have commented on the noise aspect of the card and to be honest it is definitely quieter than the 670, but not by masses. A simple noise meter app on my phone (yes I know not exactly the most accurate device in the world but better than nothing) rates My entire rig at 60dB at idle which I’m sure isn’t correct but interestingly it only raises to 64dB at full load whereas the 670 went up to 67dB. Now I don’t for one minute think that the 60dB rateing is correct to begin with but with my case on my desk and the phone sitting about 8 inches away where it normally sits, the difference between idle and load reading at least gives some form of indication on volume. One thing I will say is that some people have stated that these cards are silent under load, all I can say to that is rubbish or maybe get your hearing checked and yes they are quiet but by no means silent. Maybe because my case in on my desk I notice it more I don’t know but don’t let this put you off, they are a very good card indeed
The highest temperature I have seen throughout all my testing was 71°c and that is without me touching the fan profile at all.
Final thoughts
Its a nice card, quiet, powerful, it runs cool, its even fairly cheap for the amount of performance it gives, there isn't really a bad thing to say about it and other than the driver installation issue I had the whole process has been great fun.
Overall I would thoroughly recommend one of these cards if you are still on a 600 series or earlier.
The card
Firstly let me just say that this is quite a hefty card, compared to my MSi 670 power edition the card is certainly quite a bit chunkier, as can be seen in these few images.
Sorry the images of the both ends seem to be corrupt for some reason and I'm not removing it again just to take more sorry.
Installation was a breeze as you would expect with a single card and there is plenty of room in my HAF932 case.
Yes I did have to resort to a bit of string to move the pump return pipe just so that it isn’t resting up against the end of the card.
Drivers
Driver installation wasn’t quite as smooth as it could have been. I was already using the 344.16 beta, so I thought a straight swap out shouldn’t have been a problem. But of course little did I know just how wrong I could be.
To start with everything booted up fine and windows started and immediately told me that it needed to install a driver for the new hardware found, with no option to cancel this I let it finish, thus presenting me with a nice 800x600 windows screen (super chunky vision). Ok i thought I’ll just reinstall the Nvidia drivers and all will be ok, yeah right.
This is the screen that greeted me when I tired.
Ok so something has not gone according to plan, I checked all the connections and everything was ok there, tried removing the display adapter from the device manager and it just reinstalled the basic windows driver. I re-downloaded the driver from Nvidia , same thing again. I thought what is the caches of getting two duff copies of the driver I will re-download it again, I head back to the Nvidia driver site and the 344-16 have been added as WHQL drivers rather than beta’s so I’ll try them. Bingo all worked as it should, a clean install and now I was good to go.
Now I did think to run some benchmarks on the 670 power edition before I removed it, then rerun the same benchmarks on the 970 at stock settings and then again after overclocking.
My rig is as follows
Intel i7 920 @4GHz water cooled
8Gb 1600Mhz @1528 dual channel
MSi 670 2Gb and MSi 970 4Gb GPU’s both air cooled
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R main board
Samsung 256 Gb SSD
A couple of HDD for storage one 1TB and one 640Gb
Asus Xonar PCI soundcard
Coolermaster Haf932 case
Benchmarks
Here are the results.
First up Fluid mark.
A marked improvement I’m sure you will agree right up until the overclocked result which I have run four times and it always comes out about the same and I have no idea why.
Anyway moving on next up heaven.
Definitely a improvement there with no funny business with the overclocked result either.
Next up valley
Some serious gains here as well.
3D mark next with Skydiver and then Firestrike
A good improvement all round, I assume it is normal for the overclocked score to not be that much better on these 3D mark benches.
As for actual gaming, at the moment the only game I have installed is World of tanks and in this at 1920*1200with everything turned up to the highest in game settings I have gone from minimums of 40 to minimums of 54 that I have seen in the few rounds that I have played so far.
Overclocking.
As you have seen in the above screen shots, the card clocked just as many other seem to have done with +200 on the core and +500 memory very easily, I get driver crashes with +250 and again with +230, so more fine tuning will be required to find the absolute maximum it can do without errors. Memory wise +550 gives a few sparkles in heaven so that might require more fine tuning as well, even though to be honest I am very happy with the card boosting to 1516 and staying there for an hour long heaven cycle. I have tried adding the +87mv and upping the power limit but it seemed to make no difference to when the driver crashes or sparklies occurred, so I have both the voltage and power limit at stock for now.
Noise
A lot of people have commented on the noise aspect of the card and to be honest it is definitely quieter than the 670, but not by masses. A simple noise meter app on my phone (yes I know not exactly the most accurate device in the world but better than nothing) rates My entire rig at 60dB at idle which I’m sure isn’t correct but interestingly it only raises to 64dB at full load whereas the 670 went up to 67dB. Now I don’t for one minute think that the 60dB rateing is correct to begin with but with my case on my desk and the phone sitting about 8 inches away where it normally sits, the difference between idle and load reading at least gives some form of indication on volume. One thing I will say is that some people have stated that these cards are silent under load, all I can say to that is rubbish or maybe get your hearing checked and yes they are quiet but by no means silent. Maybe because my case in on my desk I notice it more I don’t know but don’t let this put you off, they are a very good card indeed
The highest temperature I have seen throughout all my testing was 71°c and that is without me touching the fan profile at all.
Final thoughts
Its a nice card, quiet, powerful, it runs cool, its even fairly cheap for the amount of performance it gives, there isn't really a bad thing to say about it and other than the driver installation issue I had the whole process has been great fun.
Overall I would thoroughly recommend one of these cards if you are still on a 600 series or earlier.
until I did the same and found the new one
