Conclusion

Conclusion

The graphics card industry is at a bit of an impasse, neither NVIDIA or AMD are releasing new products anytime soon hence you see a lot of respin products. The MSI GeForce GTX 780 Gaming OC with 6 GB is precisely that, a respin product based on a GPU that was launched precisely 12 months ago. Meanwhile Nvidia addresses the market with a Titan Black respin and the (what slowly seems to be plagued) Titan Z, both these product are so expensive that 99.98% of you guys can't or would not even consider purchasing them anyway. So for high-end that leaves the GTX 780 Ti at 700 USD and the GTX 780 at 550 USD in the enthusiast market. Price wise the GTX 780 obviously makes the most sense, especially with the newly released 6GB SKUs. The MSI GeForce GTX 780 Gaming 6GB is an interesting product if you ask me, in fact it intrigues me. First let me just state that I would have preferred to see this makeover on a GTX 780 Ti, but that was a choice of price positioning. Next to that, all partners are basing their re-spin on that 'regular' GTX 780, this means that Nvidia is blocking the 780 Ti respin for 6GB. It makes sense as the GTX 780 Ti would kill the market for that insanely expensive Titan Black.

Aesthetics

Armed with the latest revision of the Twinfrozr cooler the card is a hefty 20 degrees Celsius lower opposed to the reference cooler whist remaining silent. This revision is a dual-slot solution with 10cm fans, which I think it just looks great. The PCB is customized and I can spot merely quality components ensuring a longer lifespan of this product, lovely. The looks, well the cooler in its all black design and the two subtle and silent fans combined with a hint of red makes this a good looking package alright. Great looking and very sturdy I must state as well. There is a metal plate at the top of the card so the card cannot bend when seated horizontally in the PC, missing however is a full cover back-plate.

Cooling & Noise Levels

The NVIDIA reference coolers are doing their job well, but they follow the temperature target of 80 degrees C. With the TwinFrozr cooling technology the GPU will get 450W of cooling power thrown at it. As a result the temperature target might remain 80 degrees C, but we have never seen the card pass 74 Degrees. Now if the temperature is that low there is an extra benefit... the power and temp limiters do not kick in, allowing the product to boost a little higher than usual. So this is why the card is so close to the GeForce GTX Titan. Noise wise I am very happy as well. In its default configuration you cannot hear airflow when the GPU is under stress installed in a PC. It really is that silent, very impressive.

Power Consumption

Again not bad, the card is rated as having a 250 Watt TDP, we measure pretty much 249 Watts. From the top of my head that's roughly the same number as GeForce GTX 580 had  two years ago. Compared to that product you have nearly double the performance at the same wattage. That 250 Watt TDP will also make running multi-GPU solutions a bit more easy. With two cards we think an 800 Watt PSU would be sufficient. So while it's not great to have a GPU sucking up 250 Watts it could have been a lot worse. So, perspective is the word I'd like you to keep in mind.

Game Performance

The card can be considered to be as fast as the Geforce GTX Titan. Compared to a GTX 680 it seems 30% faster. Drivers wise things have settled and have been developed for a year now. We can't complain at all, we did not stumble into any issues. And with a single GPU there's no micro-stuttering (if that ever bothered you) and no multi-GPU driver issues to fight off. Performance wise, really there's not one game that won't run seriously good at the very best image quality settings. Gaming you must do with a nice 30" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600. I mean Battlefield 4 at Ultra quality is still oozing out 60+ FPS there. Now, we can discuss the advantages of a 6GB framebuffer, but after the Watch Dogs launch this week we hopefully can all agree, 6GB is justified when you keep games like GTA and Watch Dogs in mind. The latter one eats away framebuffer tremendously if you activate Ultra quality settings and apply a few hip AA settings, the game will easily pass 3GB graphics memory utilization -- real fast.

Overclocking

With the release of GTX Titan, GTX 780 and GTX 770 a thing or two have changed, the new boost modes now also can be configured with temperature targets relative to maximum power draw and your GPU Core frequency offsets. Saying that I realize it sounds complicated, but you'll have your things balanced out quite fast. This GPU with the MSI TwinFrozr cooler can take 1150 MHz fairly easily really, at that stage you added another 10% performance already. Our tweak made the GPU run at just above 1200 MHz depending on temperature, power draw and load. For a processor with a gobsmacking 7 Billion transistors, that is just impressive stuff really. 

Concluding

The MSI GeForce GTX 780 Gaming OC edition rocks hard and is a solid product man. It is a sturdy build with great component quality, it's darn fast in performance as it comes close to a Titan. Butter smooth fluid framerates is what you'll play your games with thanks to the very serious amount of horsepower at hand with this GTX 780. It does so while hardly making any noise and at very low stress temperatures. A GeForce GTX 780 with 6GB in return will offer you fluid framerates while gaming with the newest game titles and you get a reserve for titles that like 3GB+ in terms of graphics memory. Now, the card is a hint faster compared to the reference GeForce GTX 780 and is almost as fast as the GeForce GTX Titan, that's not a bad performance position to be in alright. The card is a chunk faster compared to the reference clocked models. If you opt for the MSI N780 TF 6GD5/OC edition, then you are in for something unique. Next to that, there still remains to be room left for tweaking. Overall the product is just impressive and has great aesthetics. The product is slowly becoming available in the stores but please be careful, there will be a normal and an OC edition. We reward the MSI GeForce GTX 780 Gaming OC 6GB edition with our recommended award. A lovely product with all the graphics memory in the world you need. The one remark I can make that possibly reflects you guys the best; the GTX 780 is great, but many would have liked to see this 6GB card with that small extension, GTX 780 Ti. 

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