MSI NVIDIA GTX 970 Gaming Twin Frozr HDMI DVI-I DP Graphics Card (4GB, PCI Express, DDR5, 256 Bit)

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Although the final 512MB is much slower than the high-performance segment, it is still fast enough for the graphics card to use it rather than rely on swapping data with system RAM.

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. The reason for the 8-pin upgrade cable is that this card is fed by a 6-pin/8-pin combination rather than the default dual 6-pin set-up.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. Inspired by light, it was designed to solve some of the most complex lighting and graphics challenges in visual computing. According to the Steam hardware survey, 95 per cent of PC gamers use this resolution, and we'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of those screens operate at 60Hz.

We upped the maximum fan-speed to 70 per cent to accommodate the increase in heat output, but the card was still very, very quiet overall - a feather in the cap for MSI's new TwinFrozr design. The low-performance segment is significantly slower to access than the high-performance segment, hampering performance. It’s the fastest GTX 970 we’ve seen out of the box, with a 1,203MHz GPU core clock and 1,355MHz boost clock, as well as memory overclocked to 1,800MHz. com Limited, registered in England and Wales with number 03934849, 27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX, United Kingdom.As with other cards that use the Maxwell architecture, the GTX 970 is surprisingly power-efficient, only drawing 145W when playing the most demanding games.