MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming OC 2GB Review

Final Thoughts

MSI’s GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming OC Edition 2GB graphics card costs £318.92 | £319.99 from our preferred UK retailers (all pricing accurate at the time of writing). This compares quite favourably to all other GTX 770s on the market that start at around £315 so MSI have certainly nailed UK pricing. In the USA you are looking at $399.99 which is essentially what all GTX 770s start at anyway so again MSI have nailed pricing. There is one thing that I want to pick up on though, and that is that I’ve seen the same MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming OC Edition 2GB graphics card with three difference clock speeds. First are the clock speeds we reviewed at (base/boost/memory) 1059/1111/7010MHz (At OCUK), then I saw slightly higher of 1098/1150/7010MHz (At Scan) and then even higher in the USA (At Newegg) of 1137/1198/7010MHz. I’m not quite sure what is going on with that, and obviously I’d encourage you to get the highest clocked models unless it is cheaper to get the lower clocked models in which case get those as the clocks won’t make a huge deal of difference. That said a 1137MHz overclock out of the box is more than our card could even overclock to! There is certainly something strange going on with GPU binning at the moment with these MST GTX 770 TF OC Gaming cards so I will reiterate my point – buy the highest clocked versions when possible and if your retailer doesn’t specify clock speeds in the product listing, then do ask them.

With pricing and clock speed differentials out of the way it is now time to discuss what I liked about the card. Firstly, it was super quiet and I reiterated this on previous MSI Gaming Twin Frozr cards (notably the GTX 760) that I was just so impressed with how quiet they run. MSI could easily use more aggressive profiles to gain lower temperatures but they don’t need to because the cards run cool enough and quiet enough as it is. That leads me onto the second point which is that due to the excellent cooling solution Nvidia’s GPU Boost 2.0 is allowed to work to its full effect because thermal throttling never really kicks in even over prolonged gaming sessions. Finally, I am just hugely impressed with how great the card looks. MSI have really designed a beautiful looking card thanks to their Gaming Series Twin Frozr cooler. The product is also boosted by the fact MSI use high quality components and you know that you’ve got a solid 3 year warranty backing your purchase.

Despite the positives there was one major let-down for me and I am going to be blunt here – the GPU overclocking on our sample absolutely sucked. I was able to overclock our reference GTX 770 by 70MHz more than the MSI GTX 770 Twin Frozr graphics card. I think we may of had a bad sample but either way users need to know that sometimes it is possible your card might be a rubbish overclocker, and ours was. Of course we had successes on the memory but memory clock increases give less performance boosts than GPU core clock increases. I think MSI should standardise all versions at those higher overclocks of 1098/1137MHz instead of running some at a variety of three different speeds, the higher the better but we think 1098MHz would be a good sweet spot for MSI to aim for.

One final thing to note is that MSI’s GTX 770 is part of Nvidia’s Splinter Cell Blacklist promotion. You can check participating retailers in the promotion right here. We’d encourage all consumers to take advantage of this deal as even if you don’t want the game you can easily sell it on to someone else as an effective rebate.

Pros

• Competitively priced
• Factory overclocked
• 3 year warranty
• Looks great
• Quiet operation
• Effective cooling solution
• Splinter Cell Blacklist promotion

Cons

• Clock speeds vary between retailers and regions
• Our sample was a rubbish overclocker
• Stock VRAM out of the box

eTeknix says: “MSI’s GTX 770 Twin Frozr Gaming OC Edition 2GB graphics card is a solid piece of kit that anyone would be delighted to have. I’m amazed how far MSI have come to the point where they can offer such an amazing graphics card for the same price as a reference solution. The GTX 770 TF Gaming OC card looks amazing, runs cool and quiet and is backed by high quality components and a three year warranty. If I had to put my money where my mouth is on buying a GTX 770 then this would definitely be one of the top contenders. The only blemish on an otherwise perfect performance was the poor overclocking headroom on our sample that left me a little disappointed. “

Thank you to MSI for providing this review sample.