SPECIFICATIONS
Clock speed: 1150MHz
RAM: 2GB GDDRS
Memory Clock (MHz) 3505 MHz (DDR 7010 MHz)
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 2243
Maximum Digital Resolution: 4096×2160
Maximum VGA Resolution: 2048 x 1536
WHAT’S HOT
- It’s a pretty piece of kit
- Power, power, power
- More than ready for overclocking
WHAT’S NOT
- A little on the chunky side
- Might be noisy for some
BOTTOMLINE
I’ll take three please.
REVIEW
Gaming, in particular, putting together a gaming rig, usually has a bit of voodoo attached to it. There are just so many permutations involving RAM, CPU, motherboard and videocard that there is a certain level of mysticism involved when you built a rig. Still, when it comes down to it, raw figures play a part, and if you want a smooth, seamless gaming experience, a lot of the time, bigger is better. That being the case, I believe I may have stumbled upon one of the better videocards out there, the Palit GeForce GTX 770 Jetstream.
Right off the bat, I have to say that this thing is massive and it is gorgeous. The GTX 770 has three enormous fans, with one over the GPU, flanked by two smaller fans on either side. It is of that peculiar twisty blade design that is engineered to provide optimum air circulation around the card to help keep temperature down. A three-fan setup isn’t going to be the most quiet, then again, quiet isn’t really what they are after.
The fans and heat sink make for a rather large footprint, and as such, will eat up quite a bit of space inside your case. Our original test case didn’t have enough room, so I had to go source another one from a friend in order to get this review done. It’s something to remember, but if you regularly build your own rig, it’s likely you know what to expect. The card has your standard dual SLI connector, and allows multiple GTX 770s to run concurrently. You’re going to have an equally massive case to support that. If you manage it, please send us photos.
The GTX 770 has a core clock speed of 1150Mz. This can, of course, be overclocked further, though since this is a test unit, we decided to leave well enough alone and not touch it. Given the generous cooling the card has, though, it doesn’t seem like it would be a problem.
The card also comes with 2GB of GDDRS RAM. The quick and dirty is that GDDRS has a greater memory bandwidth than your usual DDR3 RAM, allowing faster read/write times. TL;DR: Fatter memory pipe, faster performance. This is also the kind of RAM the PS4 will be using, in case you want to know. Once we had managed to cram the device in and boot up the PC, I got to hear the three fans at work. It was a little louder than what I am used to, but not terribly distracting. For the most part, it was drowned out by all the other cooling systems at play in the case.
Being of the GeForce family, Nvidia has made available the GeForce Experience utility. It looks to be more or less the same as the one on my GeForce GT 620M laptop, and allows users to quickly and painlessly configure settings to let games run as smoothly as possible. I find that it is actually quite useful, and lets you set everything from the app, without launching the game in question. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of tweaking individual game settings, and seems to do a pretty okay job. You will likely get better results if you work through each of the in-game settings yourself, but the amount of effort you’d expend doing so might not be worth it when GeForce Experience does the job just fine.
We had three games on-hand for the card to flex its muscle a bit: Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and BioShock Infinite. All three games are favorites of our, and have been played at some point or another, so we knew what to expect. For the purposes of the very informal tests, we ran each game on the highest settings available on a machine running a dual-core 2.4GHz processor and 4GB of RAM.
As expected, things were beautiful. There were parts that very clearly slowed down in the past, such as parts with lots of action onscreen with fire or particle effects were nothing to the card. It was a monster that just kept pumping out high frame rates throughout the tests. While playing, the only thing running through my mind was how to cram this video card into a PS3.
People who are wondering why you need a card like this, and taking it further, why you would ever want to link two of these in a machine,as things move progressively past HD graphics and into quite possible 3D HD territory or 4k graphics, you’re going to need a lot of muscle. This card, its scalability, and the SLI options available to you as a GTX 770 user make sure you will be ready for that future. It’s not a bad way to go really, and if you have a system upgrade waiting, it’s well worth the extra cash.
Words by Ren Alcantara
First published in Gadgets Magazine, August 2013