MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming OC review - Product Showcase

One of the key ingredients to the MSI Gaming series is their high performance cooling. Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters MSI will try to force as much performance out of the card at a maximum threshold of roughly 60 to 65 Degrees C for this 970 model card.

The card is based on a nice thin dual-slot dual fan cooling solution, revision V of TwinFrozr. The TwinFrozr V’s Fans actually stop spinning below 60°C to reduce noise and increase fan life time. Zero/Hybrid Frozr is a throwback to 2008 when MSI was the first to market high-end, so that is zero noise graphics cards thanks to the fan stopping in low-temperature situations.

Here is an inner view of the coooler, the two fans span 10cm each. But there's an advantage there as the heatsink fins cover 90% of the fan blade diameter, increasing heat dissipation ability. 

The heatpipes used are 2x 8mm SuperPipe and 2x 6mm heat pipes. At the top side of the card there is an LED lit logo, an LED illuminated GAMING Dragon.

 

At the top of the card you can see the two power headers. The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers, this one offers one 6 and one 8 pin header. So that should allow you to get a little more amperage into the card for hopefully an improved tweaking experience. A multi phase power delivery is responsible for supplying the GPU and memory with power. One additional phase power supply is dedicated to the board’s GDDR5 memory. 

As you can see, the card has SLI connectors so if you've got cash to spend, 2, 3 and 4-way SLI are an option to pursue, though we always recommend two cards maximum for the best scaling and as few driver issues as possible. Admittedly, the new design looks nice, all dark and red themed. Tweaked we’ve seen this 970 board reaching over 1.4 GHz on the Turbo clock frequency very easily, very nice but we'll talk more about that later on in this article.