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MSI GTX 760 Gaming MINI-ITX Review

Published by Hiwa Pouri on 31.01.14

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MSI is pushing hard with their Gaming Series graphics cards these days and meanwhile they've even released their mini graphics cards, with extra short PCB. Apart from the complete custom design you also get a decent factory overclocking and a typical boost clock that really isn't too bad at all.

Presentation

The mini-ITX market is becoming more and more important for most manufacturers and it does not come as a surprise that MSI wants a piece of the cake. The MSI GTX 760 ITX is made to fit well with the MSI Z87I AC Gaming motherboard as it takes up two slots and has a shorter PCB that will not go over the edge of the motherboard. It features a fully custom design packs quite a punch considering its small size.

MSI GTX 760 MINI-ITX Gaming is based on NVIDIA's Kepler GK104-225 A2 chip, which is manufactured by TSMC using the latest 28 nanometer process technology. With the GeForce GTX 760 you get six SMX units which results in 1'152 CUDA cores. Following the specifications further, there are 96 TMUs, 32 ROPs, a 256 Bit wide memory interface and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.

Frequency wise, since MSI didn't bother to overclock the memory, it stayed clocked at reference 1'502 MHz (effective 6'008 MHz). On the GPU side you find a little factory overclock with a base clock of 1'006 MHz and a typical boost clock of 1'071 MHz. That is quite shy considering it is only 38 MHz over the reference Boost clock. However, things get interesting when we look at the actual working frequencies, as during our tests, the highest Boost clock we measured was 1'162 MHz while the average Boost clock was also at 1'162 MHz (in Battlefield 3).

The card also supports GPU Boost 2.0. The first version of GPU Boost stopped overclocking the GPU when a certain power target was hit. This new second version of GPU Boost stops overclocking the card, when a certain temperature is being reached. This makes sense since the temperature is the bigger inhibitor than the power target in most cases. In this case the temperature target is 80 degrees Celsius. In other words, as long as the GPU runs lower than 80°C it will keep overclocking until the maximum frequency has been reached. This is why in our case the average boost clock was 91 MHz higher than the typical boost clock the manufacturer advertises.

Specifications

	EVGA SC ACX	ASUS DC Mini OC	MSI GTX 760 MINI-ITX	GeForce GTX 760
Chip	GK104-225-A2	GK104-225-A2	GK104-225-A2	GK104-225-A2
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	3.54 billion	3.54 billion	3.54 billion	3.54 billion
GPU clock	1'072 MHz	1'006 MHz	1'006 MHz	980 MHz
GPU Boost clock	1'137 MHz	1'072 MHz	1'072 MHz	1'033 MHz
Memory GDDR5	2'048 MB	2'048 MB	2'048 MB	2'048 MB
Memory clock	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz
Memory interface	256 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit	256 Bit
Memory bandwidth	192'300 MB/s	192'300 MB/s	192'300 MB/s	192'300 MB/s
TMUs	96	96	96	96
Shader Cores	1'152 (6 SMX)	1'152 (6 SMX)	1'152 (6 SMX)	1'152 (6 SMX)
ROPs	32	32	32	32
PCB Type	Custom Design	Custom Design	Custom Design	Reference Design
Lenght (PCB - Total)	24.3 cm	17.5 cm	17.5 cm	24.1 cm
Height (PCB - Total)	11.0 cm	12.1 cm	12.1 cm	11.0 cm
Slots	2	2	2	2
Cooler	EVGA ACX	ASUS DirectCU Mini	MSI Mini ITX Gaming	NVIDIA Reference