The GeForce GTX 770 Roundup: EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI Compared
by Ryan Smith on October 4, 2013 9:00 AM ESTShogun, Hitman, Far Cry 3, & Battlefield 3
Having taken a look at the specifications and construction of EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI’s cards, let’s dive into the matter of their performance.
As a reminder the MSI GTX 770 Lightning has the highest factory overclock and the greatest power headroom (TDP 260W). However none of these cards has a memory overclock, and therefore performance gains will not always track the GPU overclock.
The fastest card here ends up being the MSI card, but not by much. The 4% gain over the stock GTX 770 is enough to be measurable and repeatable, however it doesn’t come close to MSI’s GPU overclock. Consequently at less than 1fps difference between the MSI, EVGA, and Gigabyte cards, it doesn’t really stand out. We’re likely facing a memory bandwidth limited scenario in our very first benchmark.
Hitman is much the same story as Shogun. The fastest cards are the MSI and Gigabyte cards, which tie for a 5% gain over a stock GTX 770, but they lack the performance gains to match their GPU overclocks. Furthermore with the EVGA card only behind by less than a frame per second despite it being the lowest of the factory overclocks, they’re really no better than tied. So once more we’re looking at some degree of a memory bandwidth bottleneck. Which just goes to show why it was so important that NVIDIA paired GK104 with 7GHz GDDR5 for this card, as extra memory bandwidth is clearly crucial.
Interestingly the Gigabyte card technically takes the lead here despite the fact that it has a slightly lower GPU clock than the MSI card, but at .2fps it’s little more than experimental variation. A 3% performance gain from the factory overclock once again points to a memory bandwidth bottleneck, which prevents these factory overclocks from shining.
Battlefield 3 is generally a repeat of Far Cry 3. Gigabyte once again has ever the slightest lead due to the variation in our test results, while no one is improving on the stock GTX 770 by more than 4%. In the case of the Gigabyte and EVGA cards this is essentially free performance, but it’s not much to talk about.
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dtolios - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Downloading evga precision x or msi afterburner is a bit easier than swapping heatsinks me thinks...With this logic reviews should be using only the included drivers, which would dreadfully penalize the card with the older drivers packaged.
In a review that dares to mention "Bios flashing" for a gpu, downloading a universal overclocking utility should be considered as trivial as making sure you have current nvidia or amd drivers.
neaoon - Monday, October 7, 2013 - link
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Elijafire - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
Everyone's a critic :p Personally I found the reviews of the software management tools to be useful and informative.vailr - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
EVGA also has several GTX 7xx cards with dual or even triple bioses.http://www.evga.com/articles/00767/
Would also be interested in further information on whether any video cards being reviewed include a "UEFI GOP video firmware", which Windows 8 would require for installation and running in UEFI mode.
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Our new testbed (coming soon to a review near you) will be UEFI ready. So we'll finally be able to do some UEFI GOP articles.Gast - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
"The end result being that MSI has put together a very good card that’s easily competitive with everything else we’ve seen, but without crossing the line into unofficial modifications, the EVGA’s $35 price premium is hard to justify."Shouldn't that be MSI's $35 price premium is hard to justify?
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Whoops. Yes. Thank you for pointing that out.Elijafire - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
You are paying for the highest stock overclock.kwrzesien - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Nice review! These are exactly the three cards I was considering, and I think it leaves me leaning in the Gigabyte direction unless I just by the Lightning for the great looks. :)