MSI GTX 760 Twin Frozr IV Gaming OC Edition (2GB) Review – Dual SLI Rules

The MSI GTX 760 2GB Twin Frozr IV Gaming OC Edition is a respectable card for most PC gamers; we’ll get that out of the way right off the bat. It performs well for its price (currently ~ $240), and is more than capable of playing any game on the market at moderate to high settings in a resolution of 1920×1080. It supports up to 3 way SLI, which stands for “Scalable Link Interface” and allows for multiple Nvidia based graphics cards to be used together for increased performance.

One is never enough though and, for this report, we’ll be examining how effective two MSI GTX760 2GB Twin Frozr Gaming OC Edition Gfx cards are as a stand-alone, as well as in a SLI configuration.

The MSI GTX 760 Twin Frozr IV has 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. For those who don’t speak in acronyms, that means 2 gigabytes of “Graphics Double Data Rate 5 Random Access Memory.” In other words, it’s the short-term memory for the video card and used to store data being used for calculations, such as texture and geometry data. GDDR5 is the current generation of graphics card RAM and this card runs at 6008MHz. Stock OC modes do not affect the RAM speed of the 760.

The core clock speed is 1085MHz when in OC mode, with an advertised boost speed of 1150MHz. In Gaming mode, it clocks in at 1020MHz with a boost speed of 1085MHz. Silent mode slows the clock speed to 980MHz with a boost speed of 1033MHz. It has 2GB (gigabytes) of GDDR5 memory, which runs at 6008MHz. All of our subsequent tests were done in OC mode.

OC mode refers to overclocking, or raising the core clock speed of a piece of hardware for increased performance. MSI’s Gaming App allows you to switch between the three modes. It required disabling and re-enabling SLI in order to use the overclocking mode every time we launched the program, which was a minor annoyance. The app also has a function that increases fan speed greatly for a short time to quickly bring down temperatures.

Available ports include two dual-link DVI outputs (one digital and one analog), along with one HDMI 1.4a output and one DisplayPort 1.2 output. It can be used in up to 3-way SLI configurations and supports the DirectX 11.1 API, along with OpenGL 4.3.

GTX 760 accessories include power supply cable adapters in case your power supply does not have a PCI-E 6 pin or 8 pin connector, a small manual, and a driver and utilities disc.

It is always better to go to the manufacturer’s website and get the latest versions of all such drivers and utilities, but it’s useful to have these on disc in situations where the internet is unavailable.