14 DAY TRIAL // The GeForce GTX 980 may be the best single-GPU NVIDIA graphics card on the market, but the GTX 970 will probably sell more thanks to the price advantage, especially if it comes with a good enough overclocking setting.
MSI's new GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G Golden Edition is an example of a graphics card that has all that to offer and more.
Not only does it run much better than the original board from NVIDIA, but it has a strong and colorful cooler as well.
That's not to say that the cooler is painted in glaring pink or whatever. Instead, it combines the normal black with burnt orange identical to the color of the heatpipes. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
The specs of the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G Golden Edition OC
First off, some background. The GeForce GTX 970 was released alongside the GTX 980 two months ago, in the second half of September.
The stock video card works at 1,050 MHz / 1,178 MHz base/boost. Between that, the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM working at 7 GHz, and the components of the GM204 GPU itself (1,664 CUDA cores, 104 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 256-bit memory interface), the board can do a lot.
Still, NVIDIA's partners weren't satisfied with the stock specifications. In no small part because they had to differentiate their products from those of everyone else somehow.
MSI's new GTX 970 Gaming 4G Golden Edition is just the latest example, but it's also one of the best. The factory overclock to 1,165 / 1,317 MHz is nothing to scoff at, even if the VRAM was left alone.
As for the cooler, it is a pretty solid and complex design. Called MSI Twin Frozr V, the thermal design employs an all copper heatsink and heatpipes with anti-oxidation treatment.
Airflow Control Technology ensures that the two fans can disperse whatever heat isn't simply dissipated by the heatsink itself.
And if you don't like the default balance between performance and silence, you have manual fan control if you want, as well as Independent Fan Control to allow fans to spin at different speeds based on how cool or hot their respective sections of the heatsink are.
Finally, the MSI Gaming App allows you to quickly switch between OC, Gaming and Silent modes, and the EyeRast tab allows you to access monitor color profiles as well, as a nice side benefit. You can even reduce blue light intensity, for healthier eyes.
Availability and pricing
MSI didn't include this info in the GTX 970 Gaming 4G Golden Edition OC press release, so we'll assume that the tag is a dozen or so dollars / euro more than the $329 / €329 required by the original.
