NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 750 Ti unleashes the company's "Maxwell" architecture. It is a quantum leap forward in GPU technology, not because of its performance, but because it performs with very little power consumed. NVIDIA has been hard at work fighting the biggest enemy of graphics technology today: power consumption. All power a graphics card consumes is turned into heat, which has to be moved away from the GPU, generating noise. Power efficiency is also very important in today's mobile sector because it eats into your battery capacity. What makes NVIDIA's achievement even more impressive is that they did it without new GPU manufacturing technology. These first Maxwell GPUs are still built on a 28 nanometer production process - typically, you'd see big efficiency improvements only when moving to a new process node, which would be the 20 nanometer process coming in late 2014. Take NVIDIA's improvements today and factor in additional improvements from a 20 nm production process and we could see a new breed of high-end GPUs from the company that uses less power than existing mid-range GPUs today (think of a 100 W Titan).
Thanks to its overclock out of the box, MSI's GeForce GTX 750 Ti GAMING comes with 5% more performance than NVIDIA's stock card. I wish memory was overclocked too, like on the Palit GTX 750 Ti. The 6 Gbps memory chips on MSI's card could certainly handle it. This means that MIS GTX 750 Ti Gaming matches the HD 7850 in performance and is just 3% behind the GTX 650 Ti Boost. AMD's new Radeon R7 265 is 10% faster. The card is, in my opinion, simply not fast enough for serious 1080p gaming; you'd have to sacrifice too many detail settings to get decent framerates. For lower resolutions or older titles, the 750 Ti Gaming is a good card, though. If you want real 1080p gaming, you should look at NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660 and 660 Ti, which are still part of NVIDIA's product stack.
Let us now look at power/heat/noise. This is where the GTX 750 Ti really outshines everything on the market. As mentioned before, NVIDIA has improved power consumption, but I doubt anyone would have expected such a huge improvement. Work loads that previously required around 100 W are now handled by the GTW 750 Ti with a mere 52 W, which is almost twice as efficient. MSI's GTX 750 Ti Gaming uses a bit more power due to design changes on the board and the increased clock speed out of the box, but the card is still more efficient than any older card on the market. MSI is using their big TwinFrozr heatsink we've seen on many high-end cards before. While it seems like overkill and might make fitting the card into a smaller case difficult, the card delivers truly amazing noise levels. I think it is the quietest graphics card I have ever reviewed. In both idle and during gaming, it emits around 24 dBA, which is so quiet that the card should be considered noiseless for all intents and purposes. Not only is the card quiet, but its big cooler also makes sure it runs very cool. Great job here, MSI.
We are seeing very good overclocking potential from the GTX 750 Ti, which could be even better if NVIDIA's power limiter wouldn't engage so quickly. Normally, you'd ramp up clocks until you'd run into stability issues, which won't happen with the GTX 750 Ti. Instead, the card will sense that its power limit has been exhausted and clock down. So the way to look for a good overclock is to increase the frequency in steps until you see a drop in actual gaming performance. We accounted for this in our OC testing and the frequencies displayed represent the clocks with the highest performance.
According to MSI, the GTX 750 Ti Gaming will retail for $200, which is a hefty $50 markup over the reference design price. I guess the fancy cooler is the biggest factor for that price increase. At $200, the card is way too expensive, though, especially considering the performance it provides. There are plenty of alternatives at around $150, like the Radeon R7 265 or Palit's heavily overclocked GTX 750 Ti. None of those cards are as quiet as the MSI variant, though, so the MSI GTX 750 Ti is worth considering if you absolutely must have the quietest card and price/performance doesn't matter to you.