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 the power a graphics card consumes is turned into heat, which has to be peeled off the GPU, generating noise in the process. 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. So take NVIDIA's improvements today and factor in the 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).
Palit's GeForce GTX 750 Ti StormX Dual comes with a large 182 MHz (!) overclock out of the box, which catapults this card far beyond any other GTX 750 Ti we reviewed today. Palit is also using fast Samsung 6 GHz chips for an extra performance boost (+152 MHz). Overall, these improvements net an impressive 14% performance improvement over the NVIDIA reference design. This is the performance level at which I would have liked to see the reference GTX 750 Ti. Palit's implementation is 6% faster than the GTX 650 Ti Boost, which matches AMD's new Radeon R7 265 to a tee. This makes the card capable of good 1080p gaming, but you still shouldn't crank every settings up all the way.
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. Palit's card loses a bit of efficiency due to the overclock out of the box, but makes up for that by the much higher performance delivered. It still does not need an extra 6-pin power connector, which will make the card very interesting for users of compact cases with weaker power supplies or limited cooling capability. Just like the NVIDIA reference design, noise levels are excellent - whisper-quiet in both gaming and idle, although given the more powerful cooler, I would have wished for slightly improved noise levels from Palit.
Even with the high out-of-the-box overclock, Palit's card still has good overclocking potential, reaching higher clock levels than any other GTX 750 Ti we tested today. It is also the only card that doesn't suffer from NVIDIA's power limiter engaging rather quickly. Normally, you'd ramp up clocks until you'd come across stability issues, which won't happen with the reference GTX 750 Ti. The card will instead sense that its power limit has been exhausted and clock down. The way to look for a good overclock is to then increase frequency in steps until you see a drop in actual gaming performance. Palit's GTX 750 Ti StormX Dual, though, works just like any card we've previously overclocked, which makes things much easier.
According to Palit, their GTX 750 Ti StormX Dual will retail for $155, which is just a small $5 increase over NVIDIA reference-design pricing. While Palit's price increase is extremely reasonable and definitely makes this card the better buy over a stock-clocked, reference priced and cooled GTX 750 Ti, the GTX 750 Ti's general price is a bit too high in my opinion. Palit's massive overclock has the card competitively priced against AMD's R7 265, though, which is just $5 cheaper but has much higher power consumption and is much more noisy. So the Palit card should definitely be on your shortlist if you are looking for the best price/performance at around $150, although you should also make sure to look at the Radeon R7 265 and any used GTX 650 Ti Boost.