MSI GeForce GTX 770 Gaming and ASUS GeForce GTX 770 DirectCU II Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 brings a welcomed performance increase to the now year-old GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. Our testing found the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 2GB OC Edition cards by ASUS and MSI were between 5-15% faster than the original GeForce GTX 680 2GB reference card. This is a nice performance increase thanks to the higher clock speeds and the additional memory bandwidth provided by the 7.0 Gbps memory. The performance difference between the GeForce GTX 770 and GeForce GTX 780 are pretty staggering though as we saw about a 20% performance gap between the two cards in testing. When compared to the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition cards it splits the performance tests, so the overall performance is comparable.

Overclocking performance on the GeForce GTX 770 appears to be impressive as we were able to hit over 1300MHz Boost clocks on the ASUS GeForce GTX 770 DirectCU II OC Edition 2GB card. This increased 3DMark performance by over 11%, which is a very nice performance improvement on this GK104 Kepler powered card!

When it comes to pricing the GeForce GTX 770 comes in at $399 for the 2GB versions and we expect the 4GB versions that are coming out next month to be around $448. This makes the GeForce GTX 770 cards $250 less expensive than the GeForce GTX 780. If you don’t want to spend $649.99 shipped on a GeForce GTX 780, the performance seen on the GeForce GTX 770 is hard to ignore. This card has a nice price versus performance ratio and is less expensive than the GeForce GTX 680 that it replaces. The ASUS GeForce GTX 770 DirectCU II OC and MSI GeForce GTX 770 Gaming OC Edition cards both retail for $409.99, so they are about $10 more than a reference card. The only downside to the pricing is that no game bundle promotions are available at this time.

Legit Bottom Line: At the end of the day the GeForce GTX 680 has been refreshed and had a price cut. The performance gains of 5-15% are welcomed and this makes for a solid high-end graphics option. If you are looking for a video card in the $400-$450 price range be sure to check out the GeForce GTX 770!