Reviewed: MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G

In addition to the open air test bench, I also tested the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G in the Fractal Design Define R5 case in conjunction with other reviews to see how it fared thermally and acoustically inside a case. All of the benchmarks results were undertaken on the open air test bench.

Overclocking

When overclocking, we didn’t increase the voltage and were still able to reach a stable 1501 MHz boost result via MSI Afterburner. When we tried for a higher overclock than that artefacts started appearing so we backed off. Even on the overclock, the card remained under 70C and the cooler was able to maintain this without going over 58% fan speed or registering above ambient room noise on our decibel meter at 50cm on the open test bench. This gave us about 10% improvement on our benchmarks across the board but keep in mind that overclocking varies with each chip and your mileage may vary.

Noise and Temperatures

Under load (even overclocked), the card didn’t go over 68 degrees or 58% fan speed and was barely audible – it didn’t register on our decibel meter above the power supply fan. The Twin Frozr V fans didn’t spin at idle which made the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G silent.

The testing benchmark results show how the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G trades with and narrowly beats a pair of Gigabyte GTX 670 2GB cards running in SLI. As expected, it smashes the previous generation mid level cards in what can hardly be called a fair contest. If you are considering an upgrade, hopefully one of the other cards in the tests is a representation of what you currently have and these results give you an idea of what you could expect to gain from the GTX 980. It’s also worth noting that when we compare the MSI GTX 980 to the SLI GTX 670 configuration, the power draw of the test rig with the 980 was less than 70% and the acoustic difference was also very impressive. Our test bench with SLI configuration drew 405W from the wall during our Unigine run whilst the same test bench with a single GTX 980 only needed 278W to do the same run.

We also tested the GTX 980 Gaming 4G in the Fractal Design Define R5 case with the side panels on and we couldn’t identify any graphics card cooler noise whilst benchmarking or playing games like FarCry 4 or Battlefield 4 that push the GPU. The practical build was incredibly quiet and well suited to a bedroom or shared space. The red highlights on the MSI gaming card match in perfectly with the ASUS ROG red slots and highlights on the Maximus Gene VI motherboard which is a bonus. This is the sort of card that makes you want a case with a window.

2560×1440 Gaming

Using the settings in the 1920×1080 tests above, we repeated the tests with a resolution of 2560×1440 to get the results below. 

2560x1440

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