[section_title title=Closer Look]Closer Look
The MSI GTX 970 Gaming Twin Frozr V card comes in a very striking red and black colour; what else would you expect of a card in MSI’s Gaming range? The one huge difference between this and other MSI Gaming cards of course is the addition of the new Twin Frozr V cooler which is shown in more detail on the next page!
Now interestingly the new NVIDIA Maxwell GTX 970 has 128 more cores than the model it replaces (The GTX 770) which brings the current total to 1664; this is quite a bit shorter than the GTX 780Ti which has a huge 2880 CUDA cores. How this translates into performance will be determined on how well Maxwell works around the lower core count but it should make for some interesting testing.
The Twin Frozr V cooler is thinner than not just the Twin Frozr IV cooler but thinner than the rest of the competing pack; with MSI advertising improved cooling performance over the TF4, this should be impressive when it comes to testing. Like all the new generation of graphics cards on the market, the GTX 970 features PCI-E x16 Gen3 support in single GPU configurations; check CPU/motherboard compatibility to make sure Gen3 is support in SLI. If it doesn’t, it is backwards compatible with Gen2 slots.
MSI have opted for a dual heat pipe design for the Twin Frozr V cooler over a traditional triple pipe design featured on models such as EVGA’s ACX cooler etc. This shouldn’t have too much of an effect on cooling performance and should hopefully improve it.
The MSI Twin Frozr V has an impressive 6+2 power phase design which is more than any of the current GTX 970 graphics cards around at the moment; this is solidified by the use of Military Class components which MSI have used for donkeys. Not only should this increase longevity of the card but should mean better efficiency too; something Maxwell has been geared towards.
MSI have also uprated the power delivery into their Gaming model with 1 x 8pin and 1 x 6pin power connectors required; this is an improvement over the 2 x 6pin needed on a reference model but I bet the question, is it needed? I will leave that up to you to decide.
In terms of connectivity, the MSI Gaming GTX 970 has 2 x Dual-link DVI connectors (1 x DVI-I and 1 x DVI-D) which support a maximum resolution of 2048×1536 at 60Hz, 1 x HDMI 1.4a port with support for 4K HD resolutions and 1 x DisplayPort 1.2 which also has support for the newly launched 4K HD.
One of the most interesting aesthetical points of the new MSI Twin Frozr V cooler is the included white backlit LED logo which brings the dragon and MSI logo to life; I love myself some white LEDs!!!
