MSI came to the rescue in our case, providing us with its new card based on its TwinFrozr 5 design, impressing us with its ability to stay whisper-quiet even when we over-volted and overclocked this card to its limits. This PC has a well paired quad core i5 CPU and GPU, so you won’t come across any bottlenecks during gaming, maximising your game smoothness at all times. UPDATE 23/2/15 9:40am: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 is currently the subject of much controversy owing to the firm marketing the card with incorrect specs - a state of affairs that has led to a lawsuit.

From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance. At Nvidia's recent tech conference, the firm was confident that there would be no hit to performance - despite the downscaling algorithm using a 13-tap Gaussian filter to improve results compared to basic super-sampling.As we have a big bunch of existing data sitting on our hard drive from our recent GPU testing, we actually have two comparisons for you here.

The Twin Frozr V cooler has a plastic shroud, though it's well built, and an aggressive and attractive red and black colour scheme that suits the all-black PCB well. If you’re after an Nvidia GTX 970, the Asus STRIX is a quick model and is worth the extra fiver over MSI’s GTX 970 for a modest performance increase. That's certainly a big part of the risk, but in absolute performance even aging Maxwell still performs okay — it's actually slightly faster than Nvidia's GTX 1650, for example (not the 1650 Super or 1650 GDDR6, though).Just tried it with nothing more than 150Mhz extra core clock, saw it boost to 1577, and stayed at 53c. DSR produces smoother images by rendering a game at a high resolution, then downscaling it to the native resolution of the display using advanced filtering. Join the experts who read Tom's Hardware for the inside track on enthusiast PC tech news — and have for over 25 years. It's the tiniest of disappointments bearing in mind the big performance wins offered by the GTX 970 in general, though - not to mention the fact that overall efficiency still outstrips the Hawaii chip in the R9 290 and 290X, and indeed the GK110 processor found in GTX 780, Titan and 780 Ti, even with an aggressive overclock in place. Ultra-level settings aren't designed with 4K in mind, and rendering features like insane anti-aliasing aren't really needed when the size of pixels on a 4K display is so very small.

We re-run our 1080p tests at the higher resolution and find that the GTX 970 still manages to deliver the goods. VR is a game changer for games such as Elite Dangerous, Portal 3, Flight simulator, Project cars and who knows the elusive Half Life 3 may make an appearance from Valve as being VR optimised, lets keep our fingers crossed. The dragon and MSI logos on the side just above the pair of SLI connectors are backlit by white LEDs. Being a dual-slot card, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 draws power from 2x 6-pin power connectors, with power draw rated at 148 W maximum.

The cost of actually designing and verifying an SoC at nodes past 28nm is approaching the breaking point for most markets, that's why companies aren't jumping on to them.