MSI has been a bit of a stranger to us for a few months but their latest releases have been making some real waves within the graphics card market. Their cooling solutions are top-notch, performance is always in the upper tiers and their products are built to last in today’s most demanding environments. No better example of this newfound poise can be found than MSI’s GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G.
MSI’s focus for the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G is pretty straightforward. They want to offer gamers better-than-stock performance in a card that doesn’t command a massive premium and boasts much broader availability than a specialist card like Zotac’s AMP! Extreme or EVGA’s Classified. Indeed, with a price of $680USD (but significantly more in Canada) it is a good $20 less expensive than the flagship competitors from EVGA and Zotac.
While it may have the same $679 price as EVGA’s GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ series, the Gaming 6G actually provides significantly better clock speeds. With a Base and Boost Clock of 1178MHz and 1279MHz respectively, it is closer to the insane Zotac AMP! Extreme than EVGA’s competitor. Even memory speeds have undergone a slight increase to 7100MHz which surely isn’t much but it’s still more than many other NVIDIA board partners offer.
One thing to take into account is the frequencies listed above are for MSI’s so-called OC Mode which is what the Gaming 6G runs at when it’s installed with accompanying software. Meanwhile Gaming Mode with a 1140MHz Base Clock is the default frequency. When the MSI Gaming App is installed, two software-based options are available: the aforementioned OC Mode and Silent Mode (reference GTX 980 Ti clocks). The idea here is to offer users a combination of performance options that cover literally every situation and can be set based upon how much horsepower your game de jour requires. The app also controls the card’s built-in LED color. For the purposes of this review, all benchmarks will be conducted in OC Mode.
With a two-tone black and red heatsink shroud design the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G is one good looking card but that’s par for the course from MSI these days. More importantly, despite boasting temperature reduction figures in the 15% range versus NVIDIA’s reference cooler, the Twin Frozr V heatsink retains a two-slot height and allowed MSI to keep length at a very reasonable 11”. It is ever so slightly wider though. Compare and contrast that to Zotac’s brute force approach and it becomes evident that there’s a ton of engineering built into this cooler design.
The Twin Frozr V cooler is the attest iteration in MSI’s highly respected Twin Frozr lineup and it packs a number of distinct features which allow for extremely low temperatures without the need for a higher or longer heatsink design. The most apparent visual feature is the two massive 100mm TORX fans which are designed with a specialized indented dispersion fan blade that’s meant to maximize airflow and static pressure. Those two key elements boost heatsink efficiency by moving fresh air through the internal cooling fins in the most effective way possible. Meanwhile, the fans have the ability to completely power down in idle and low load situations.
Below that two-tone shroud is an extensive heatsink that has a quartet of 8mm heatpipes that have been specially designed to reduce end-to-end lengths and thus increase the heat transfer capabilities.
Around the card’s underside is a full-coverage backplate which unfortunately doesn’t make direct contact with the PCB but from an aesthetic standpoint, it sure looks good. Luckily, there are perforations to facilitate air movement in key zones.
Power input is handled by a pair of 8-pin connectors, giving the Gaming 6G a 375W current capacity. This won’t be utilized with air cooling and simple software overclocking parameters but extreme overclockers should be able to take advantage of the additional overhead.
The video output selection is pretty straightforward with a single DVI, three DisplayPorts and a single HDMI 1.4 output.
MSI’s focus for the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G is pretty straightforward. They want to offer gamers better-than-stock performance in a card that doesn’t command a massive premium and boasts much broader availability than a specialist card like Zotac’s AMP! Extreme or EVGA’s Classified. Indeed, with a price of $680USD (but significantly more in Canada) it is a good $20 less expensive than the flagship competitors from EVGA and Zotac.
While it may have the same $679 price as EVGA’s GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ series, the Gaming 6G actually provides significantly better clock speeds. With a Base and Boost Clock of 1178MHz and 1279MHz respectively, it is closer to the insane Zotac AMP! Extreme than EVGA’s competitor. Even memory speeds have undergone a slight increase to 7100MHz which surely isn’t much but it’s still more than many other NVIDIA board partners offer.
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One thing to take into account is the frequencies listed above are for MSI’s so-called OC Mode which is what the Gaming 6G runs at when it’s installed with accompanying software. Meanwhile Gaming Mode with a 1140MHz Base Clock is the default frequency. When the MSI Gaming App is installed, two software-based options are available: the aforementioned OC Mode and Silent Mode (reference GTX 980 Ti clocks). The idea here is to offer users a combination of performance options that cover literally every situation and can be set based upon how much horsepower your game de jour requires. The app also controls the card’s built-in LED color. For the purposes of this review, all benchmarks will be conducted in OC Mode.
With a two-tone black and red heatsink shroud design the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G is one good looking card but that’s par for the course from MSI these days. More importantly, despite boasting temperature reduction figures in the 15% range versus NVIDIA’s reference cooler, the Twin Frozr V heatsink retains a two-slot height and allowed MSI to keep length at a very reasonable 11”. It is ever so slightly wider though. Compare and contrast that to Zotac’s brute force approach and it becomes evident that there’s a ton of engineering built into this cooler design.
The Twin Frozr V cooler is the attest iteration in MSI’s highly respected Twin Frozr lineup and it packs a number of distinct features which allow for extremely low temperatures without the need for a higher or longer heatsink design. The most apparent visual feature is the two massive 100mm TORX fans which are designed with a specialized indented dispersion fan blade that’s meant to maximize airflow and static pressure. Those two key elements boost heatsink efficiency by moving fresh air through the internal cooling fins in the most effective way possible. Meanwhile, the fans have the ability to completely power down in idle and low load situations.
Below that two-tone shroud is an extensive heatsink that has a quartet of 8mm heatpipes that have been specially designed to reduce end-to-end lengths and thus increase the heat transfer capabilities.
Around the card’s underside is a full-coverage backplate which unfortunately doesn’t make direct contact with the PCB but from an aesthetic standpoint, it sure looks good. Luckily, there are perforations to facilitate air movement in key zones.
Power input is handled by a pair of 8-pin connectors, giving the Gaming 6G a 375W current capacity. This won’t be utilized with air cooling and simple software overclocking parameters but extreme overclockers should be able to take advantage of the additional overhead.
The video output selection is pretty straightforward with a single DVI, three DisplayPorts and a single HDMI 1.4 output.
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