A couple months ago, NVIDIA introduced its new flagship card equipped with a full Maxwell GM204 chip. The GTX 980 proved to be a product the likes we have never seen from the green team. This card comes at an unprecedented price point for a high-end GPU compared to previous generation Kepler-based products. The GTX 980 also brought to the table impressive power efficiency without sacrificing any performance and was up there with the GTX 780 Ti in the charts. The new NVIDIA flagship card comes with a rich feature set; including Multi-Frame sampled AA (MFAA), DirectX 12 support, Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), and Voxel Global Illumination (VGI).

While providing impressive gaming performance at stock speeds, the reference NVIDIA GTX 980 I reviewed previously also showed great overclocking headroom. It was only a matter of time before various manufacturers started releasing non-reference cards that tapped into the new architecture potential. MSI is one such manufacturer that - sure enough - did not miss on the opportunity to expand an already extensive product lineup. The Taiwanese company produces some of the best gaming hardware available today, and what I personally consider some of the best looking motherboards and GPUs. Yep, I'm a sucker for anything with tribal dragons on it.

Today I will be looking at the factory overclocked MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G, where MSI takes the reference design and looks to improve it in every possible way. This video card comes with the distinct look of the MSI Gaming series with a red and black color theme and a familiar shroud design. Although the card looks similar to previous products from MSI, the GTX 980 Gaming 4G is actually equipped with a new hybrid cooling solution labeled Twin Frozr V. Built around two 100mm Torx fans, a massive heatsink, and a set of large heat pipes; this cooling solution is coupled with the latest MIL-STD-810G certified "Military Class" components to provide stability and keep the temps in check. Surely a welcome setup knowing that out of the box, the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G runs at core speeds of 1216MHz with boost clocks of 1317MHz in OC mode compared to the reference clock speeds of 1126MHz with a Turbo Boost 2.0 of 1216MHz. The card's clock speeds can be controlled through the MSI Gaming App, which makes available two additional modes: a Gaming mode with 1190MHz clock speeds (1291MHz Boost clock), and a Silent mode running at 1140MHz (1241MHz Boost clock).