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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Ryan Smith - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
We're not setup to review open loop coolers. However the new testbed will be able to accommodate GPUs with closed loop coolers, such as the Asus Ares.Hrel - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I am just endlessly impressed with Gigabyte. The consistently offer a performance to value ratio that is either the best or among the best and they do so at very competitive prices even without discounts and sales. When their products do go on sale they're simply unbeatable. I can't wait to see them expand into more categories.Hrel - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Also, their reliability is flawless and their support is top notch.Anandtech, when are you going to update your comment section? We REALLY need more features. The ability to edit comments, notifications via email when people respond. These are BASIC things.
Edkiefer - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
This is one time for MSI, it probably just pays to get MSI Gaming N770 TF 2GD5/OC model as you mention 770 are pushed to limit already . The MSI gaming N770 TF is same price as others 399$RadiclDreamer - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I've been waiting for some time for a review that includes the 4GB version as well, any chance of that happening?Kevin G - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
8.2 Ghz is very impressive for a memory overclock. I'd love to see such speeds on Ttian or the R9 290x for the extra bandwidth. That'd get you 524 GB/s bandwidth on the R9 290x which should be very beneficial for 4k gaming. Of course this is wishful thinking as going with a wider bus often limits memory bus speeds, but one can dream right?The Von Matrices - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
The problem is that the wider you make the memory bus the harder it is to route the traces on the PCB to allow high-frequency operation. AMD is only shipping the R9 290X at around 5GHz memory, and you can bet that in order to save on costs they won't be using higher rated memory chips. It might take custom PCBs before different memory chips are used, and AMD isn't allowing vendors to customize the card at all at launch.hulu - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
You can use MSI Afterburner on any AMD/NVidia based graphics card regardless of vendor. Only thing you lose by going non-MSI non-reference board (like the Gigabyte of this roundup), is voltage control, but that is limited on these GTX 700 series cards anyway.wsaenotsock - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Maybe I missed it, but where the hell is the test system's information, or did including that information go out of style..iTzSnypah - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I think that to truly test the effectiveness of each cooler the noise and temperature graphs should use the reference clocks.