14 DAY TRIAL // Graphics cards don't really need to look all that awesome in order to play the best games on the market, but AMD, NVIDIA, and their OEMs like to aesthetically embellish them pretty often anyway. Such is the case for the MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gold.
The GeForce GTX 970 is not the best of NVIDIA's Maxwell-based video boards, or the Santa Clara, California-based company's video cards in general.
However, it does rank second, and it should have an easy enough time playing even the newest games at full setting, so long as you don't expect 4K resolutions to work all that well. Unless you use a multi-card SLI setup with multiple monitors anyway.
Anyway, since the GeForce GTX 970 is still very much a high-end gaming product, MSI felt more than comfortable releasing a limited, super edition of it.
The MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gold graphics card
Unfortunately, while we do know that Micro-Star International took liberties when it came to the performance of the graphics processing unit, we don't know what the performance actually is.
Since the GM204 normally runs at 1,050 MHz / 1,178 MHz base/boost, we can assume that the new MSI model will be faster by around 50-100 MHz, maybe. That's just our guess though, based on the little info and pictures that made it to the web through KitGuru. The 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, at least, were probably left at 7 GHz.
Of course, there's always the possibility that MSI didn't actually implement any factory overclocking at all.
Instead, it could have chosen to release this as a “normal” performance board but whose tougher components make it well suited for custom overclocking at the hands of the user. Similarly, the adapter could be given a minor factory OC, but still allow buyers to tweak the settings as they wish.
As for the cooler, we're looking at a heatsink made of pure copper instead of aluminum, exposed copper heat pipes, and a shroud tinted with golden orange.
There are two large fans dissipating whatever heat is pulled out of the GPU and dissipated across the heatsink. Ironically, though, if you decide to push the card as far as you can in an overclocking scenario, you'll likely be forced to install a water cooler of some sort instead, since air cooling has limits no matter how good the implementation.
Availability and pricing
The MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gold was only revealed at the BeatIT 2014 event, so the product isn't up for sale anywhere yet. The price is unknown, and MSI didn't say exactly how many would be made in this limited run either. So I guess we're running blind. Alas.
