MSI GeForce GTX 770 Lightning Video Card Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

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MSI GeForce GTX 770 Lightning Video Card Review - NVIDIA debuts the "new" GeForce GTX 770 today. The GeForce GTX 770 is poised to provide refreshed performance, for a surprising price. We evaluate a retail MSI GeForce GTX 770 Lightning flagship video card from MSI with specifications that will make any enthusiast smile. The $399 price point just got a kick in the pants.
 
Awesome!...Damn I just bought a second 670! oh well it was only $300, great to see Nvidia dropping prices and upping performance!
 
That's a perfect price!!!! Nice one Nvidia. Now time for team red to respond!!! :D
 
Finally the price/performance the 680 would have got a year ago.

I wonder why the 7ghz memory, it doesn't do much for performance as gpu clockspeed.

Hopefully prices on lesser cards will go down too, I'd love to get a 660Ti for a 660 regular price.
 
Thank you for the review. I just ordered a 7950.

At the end of the day, I had to go with the current 7950 deal for $280 ($260 MIR, ends today). The AMD bundled games made the difference. I would eventually purchase and play all four of those games.... admittedly at a discount, so I'll say those games are worth $60-$80 to me. That brings the 7950 down to $200.

Now, I'm reasonably sure I will be able to get $100 net from selling my shader mod 6950. That makes the 7950 a $100 upgrade path for me vs a $300 upgrade path for the 770.

Of course the 770 is faster, again, it came down to: Is the 770 GTX $200 faster than a 7950? I know it's subjective but I guess I am more "high end" than "enthusiast" these days. At $100 it's a no brainer to upgrade, especially considering I am single monitor 1900x1200.
 
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I wonder why the 7ghz memory, it doesn't do much for performance as gpu clockspeed.

My personal opinion on this was so the 770 would not be seen as a totally rebadged 680. The 7GHz memory does give it more differentiation. It will be interesting to see if the supply of 7GHz memory can keep up with demand. 7GHz memory is going to be a hot commodity IMO. This could potentially impact the build cost of this card in the next few months.
 
@Stoly, the original GTX 680 was memory bottlenecked, so to that end, the extra memory is not unwelcome.

Kyle, out of curiosity, will there be an article on overclocking this chip through Afterburner? Hopefully unlike the 680 Afterburner is working out of the box - after all this card is very similar to the 680 Lightning.

Otherwise, pretty nice review. I'm thinking about getting this 770 now.
 
I just bought a GTX670 for $400 about a month ago! GAWDDAMMIT!!! Man I suck at life.
 
$399 can we get a woo woo!

@toddw - question is what the 760ti will be priced at, not this. If the 760ti > 7950 @ $299....
 
$399 can we get a woo woo!

@toddw - question is what the 760ti will be priced at, not this. If the 760ti > 7950 @ $299....

I hear you. Assuming roughly 7950 = 760Ti, it came down to the games. As it happens I want all those games and eventually would have purchased all four. Even waiting and getting them on a steam sale $60-$80 for all four of them is not a stretch.

I imagine if someone already had those games, or was not interested in those games, they would arrive at a different purchase decision.
 
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I just bought a GTX670 for $400 about a month ago! GAWDDAMMIT!!! Man I suck at life.

I'm right there with ya, MacLeod! I purchased a 7950 for one system, and an eVGA 670 FTW for the other. If you registered your card with eVGA, you can (of course) step up to a 7xx series card, and they have already listed the vanilla 770 on their step-up hierarchy.

Yeah, the difference between an OC'ed 670 and a reference 770 won't be much, but the difference in price is negligible, so I'll probably end up doing it.
 
It's 400 euro right now in Europe... and tad more expensive than 7970. If AMD cuts the 7970 price by $100, it would be most sweetest deal on the market :)

Still, on my 670 PE, I believe there is not much point to switch to 770 and I can't afford 780. So waiting for Maxwell :)
 
My last GPU was GTX 570(vanilla) and a couple months ago, upgraded to 7950. I had mentioned here a bit back that I had single card stutter issues with the 7950. Well, after ironing that problem out, I coulnd'nt be happier. Initially, I wanted to stay with the green team because the 570 worked out so well for me. I wanted to get the 670 but, to quote a NYC politician wannabe: the price for these nVidia GPUs are "TOO DAMN HIGH!" For 570 owners like meself, there was nowhere to go.
I don't think there's anyone who can justify spending 100+ bucks on a 670 over a 7950. The free games that came with the card....now, I'm the greatest uncle in the world since giving them away to the tykes.

In my humble opinion...the high GPU prices for both camps are spinning outta control. Congress needs to put out a regulatory legislation for working stiffs like me to afford a 770.

In the meantime, I'm just gonna wait for Matrox to release their Millenium GTX HD 6969 Thz edition.
 
Kyle, out of curiosity, will there be an article on overclocking this chip through Afterburner?

No overclocking test for a video card reviewed by [H] just doesn't seem right!
ETA for an article comparing a max OC'd 770 to a max OC'd 7970 and 680?
I have a feeling that a custom cooled and OC'd 7970 is faster but i'd be willing to be proved wrong!
 
Thanks Kyle - look forward to reading it.

On the whole right now it looks like:
AMD Advantages
- You can find 7970s right now for around the ~$350 mark (I expect that the 7970 will probably go down in price after this)
- The games bundle that AMD includes (assuming you like the games included)

Nvidia Advantages
- This Lightning seems to be slightly faster than the 7970 GHz, although I imagine factoring in OC-ing, a good 7970 with a custom PCB and cooler could hold it's own ground
- Power consumption
- Right now Nvidia does have better multi-GPU drivers, although we'll see whether in the future that holds

Both cards should in theory have pretty mature drivers; this 770 is more or less a 680 and the 7970 has been around since the start of 2012.
 
Anyone know if any the cards will come with the titan style heatsink like the reference models sent out to review sites. I have only seen custom heatsinks on all the ones available at E-tailors .
 
I know the article is just a few clicks away but it would have been very useful to have included the results from the test of the GTX 780.
 
Anyone know if any the cards will come with the titan style heatsink like the reference models sent out to review sites. I have only seen custom heatsinks on all the ones available at E-tailors .

Unlikely. I'm guessing the Titan-style cooler is cost-prohibitive for a card at this price point.
 
Yawn :eek: 5% faster than GTX 680, costs what it should have costed a long time ago. Then again it costs $250 less than GTX 780 and that card is only 20% faster so it could be worse.
 
wow - what a price. SO - will the prices on the 680s finally drop? I am sitting on a reference 680 and have been debating on going SLI. If the 680s would drop to around $300 I would be all over that!

Right now - the egg has a bunch of 770s for $399 while the cheapest 680 is $419 and most are at $450+.
 
Anybody know if waterblocks for the 680 Lightning will fit the 770 Lightning? Might finally be able to sell the two unopened Aquacomputer blocks I have collecting dust.
 
Anybody know if waterblocks for the 680 Lightning will fit the 770 Lightning? Might finally be able to sell the two unopened Aquacomputer blocks I have collecting dust.

770 is built on the 680 PCB. Now the PCB may be custom per company.
 
Yawn :eek: 5% faster than GTX 680, costs what it should have costed a long time ago. Then again it costs $250 less than GTX 780 and that card is only 20% faster so it could be worse.

I don't get it..the newer x70 is faster than a previous x80 and costs less? You call that a yawn? Boggle. Nobody can seem to please anybody. What would it take to turn your yawn into a :eek: My guess is it would be unreasonable but I would love to be wrong.
 
I don't get it..the newer x70 is faster than a previous x80 and costs less? You call that a yawn? Boggle. Nobody can seem to please anybody. What would it take to turn your yawn into a :eek: My guess is it would be unreasonable but I would love to be wrong.

i think he's referring to the fact that the 680 was originally supposed to be the 670 and the titian/780 was supposed to be the 680:eek:
 
I'm right there with ya, MacLeod! I purchased a 7950 for one system, and an eVGA 670 FTW for the other. If you registered your card with eVGA, you can (of course) step up to a 7xx series card, and they have already listed the vanilla 770 on their step-up hierarchy.

Yeah, the difference between an OC'ed 670 and a reference 770 won't be much, but the difference in price is negligible, so I'll probably end up doing it.

I was looking at the benchies on some of the reviews and the differences aren't that big. 4-5 frames in most games. Thing I don't know about the Step Up program is that you have send your gpu off and then wait for them to send you the new one. No telling how long that'll take and I'm not sure I wanna deal with digging my old AMD card out, reinstalling drivers and all that crap.
 
I was hoping the MSRP would be $399. It is. For some reason I'm having reservations when hovering over the place order button.
 
I'd love to see a 680 price drop.

I would guess that Nvidia and the AIB partners will stop making/selling 680/670s pretty soon and the supply will dry up on those "older" models. With supply drying up I don't see much of a price drop. The used market is where all the action will be.
 
What about Rome?
Are we in Rome and we should do thusly, or is it burning? :)

Not built in a day? eg. they ARE working on it, but didn't have to time to get a full "overclock" review in time for release. That's my assumption, although I could be wrong - overclock articles here at H tend to be a bit more in depth compared to various other websites. Just my guess.
 
Kyle, Brent, et all.

What are the odds that we see a Total War included in future benchmarks? Shogun 2 has a canned benchmark for 1080p DX11 (e.g. apples to apple), and also a benchmark that pulls actual your in-game settings (e.g. apples to oranges). I can send cookies if this supports my stance. :)
 
Kyle, Brent, et all.

What are the odds that we see a Total War included in future benchmarks? Shogun 2 has a canned benchmark for 1080p DX11 (e.g. apples to apple), and also a benchmark that pulls actual your in-game settings (e.g. apples to oranges). I can send cookies if this supports my stance. :)

Hopefully i'm not speaking out of place and apologies if so - but I think they've discussed this before, and they try to benchmark "current" games in their suite. Other posters have mentioned this from time to time (including myself) ;). Shogun 2 is a great benchmark but is a dated game.
 
Kyle, Brent, et all.

What are the odds that we see a Total War included in future benchmarks? Shogun 2 has a canned benchmark for 1080p DX11 (e.g. apples to apple), and also a benchmark that pulls actual your in-game settings (e.g. apples to oranges). I can send cookies if this supports my stance. :)

Considering that they don't use canned benchmarks for testing, I'd say the odds are pretty low.
 
Considering that they don't use canned benchmarks for testing, I'd say the odds are pretty low.

Even so, setting up the same custom battle repeatedly with different configurations is doable. And I know Shogun is dated now, but we have Rome 2 on the horizon. I wonder what are the chances that any Total War game will make its way into the benchmark suite?
 
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