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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ThomasS31 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Do you measure the noise in open desk setup?Or in a particular case?
I think (actually sure) that the difference between card coolers, their thermal efficiency heavily depend on the environment they are in. Open desk does not simulate any real case airflow hence you may get false rpm (lower) and noise characteristics vs in a real life in-case scenario.
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
All of our GPU testing is in a case, noise testing included. Specifically we use a Thermaltake Speedo (though that's getting retired next week).zlandar - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Be nice to have the Asus 770 card. It has a very large heatsink which makes it ideal for single GPU overclocking IMO. Drawback is the extra slot taken up if you are planning to SLI.maecenas - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...The Asus 770 is two slots, but definitely would have liked to have seen it in this review. I have the Asus 660 - really like that heatpipe system, very quiet and efficient
yodies - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Ryan, great article. EVGA has a 770 with 4GB of VRAM for sale as well. What sorts of differences would the additional RAM make?kwrzesien - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Gigabyte has a 4GB Windforce 3X too. Maybe these could justify another article? It makes me think I would like to see a deeper dive between these three cards plus their 4GB brothers in just one or two games but at multiple resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and something bigger) and quality settings, trying to find where clock rate and memory bandwidth tradeoff as the limiting factor. One of the games should be something that showed a difference in today's test and the other should be one that didn't.Still, I think it is pretty clear that the 770 is a great performer especially for a small chip like the GK104. It makes me wonder what a chip like this would do if they scaled it up to GK110 size and kept it strictly a gaming chip.
DanNeely - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
HardOCP looks at extra ram card regularly, I don't think any they've had in the last few years showed any benefit from the extra memory in gameplay.A5 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Yeah. It'd probably help if you did SLI on a multi-monitor setup, but at single-GPU resolutions the amount of memory isn't going to hurt on you on these.GBHans - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
Fwiw, the 4gb version of the evga 770 I have also achieves these same over clocks as Ryan saw on the 2gb model, including on the memory. I run triple 1440x900=4320x900, and as several have commented, it's probably really only on those very high resolutions where the 4gb memory comes into play. In case it helps, when running BF4 with settings at mix of mostly ultra & some on high, afterburner reports VRAM usage in ~2.4gb range on most maps.Taristin - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
It would be awesome to see a review of one of eVGA's niche cards, like the GTX770 Classified Hydro Copper. I'm running one in my system atm, and love it, but would love to see what's said about it from professional reviewers.