PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC 2GB Review

Performance Analysis

Across our benchmarks, PNY's overclocks result in improvements over the stock GTX 770 2GB that tend to lie somewhere between 5 and 10 percent, which is as expected. Typically, however, performance still doesn't come too close to that of even a stock speed GTX 780 3GB, thanks to the GTX 780's massive GK110 GPU.

In Battlefield 3, we observe minimum frame rate gains of around 7 percent across the three resolutions, but the GTX 770 XLR8 2GB still never closes more than half the gap between the stock card and the GTX 780. This is fair enough, however, given how much more the beefier card costs, and naturally PNY's card increases the gap between itself and the GTX 680 2GB and AMD's HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition. The frame rate improvements in BioShock are a little less, but otherwise the story is the same barring the slight inconsistency in the triple screen test, where all single GPU cards except the GTX 780 3GB and GTX Titan are unplayable anyway.


Crysis 3 is where the XLR8 card shows the biggest gains over a stock model, with a 10 percent boost at 1,920 x 1,080. Performance also draws closer to the GTX 780 3GB in this game than any other, but improvements are a little less as you up the resolution. Triple screen gamers would need to make some sacrifices to their settings, as even the might Titan struggles in our demanding test here. In Skyrim, PNY's card again gets relatively close to the GTX 780's performance, but less so at higher resolutions. Unigine's Valley benchmark, meanwhile, has the XLR8 model 7 percent ahead of the GTX 770 2GB, but still trailing the GTX 780 3GB by 11 percent.

There is a slight increase to our system's power draw using the overclocked card versus the stock, but nothing that will break the bank. It could still be considered a little inefficient given that its load power draw sits closer to the GTX 780 3GB than the GTX 770 2GB, despite being consistently closer to the latter in terms of performance. Nevertheless, it still draws less power than AMD's top end card while outpacing it in every test, so by that metric it's still a winner. Also, despite a comparatively high idle temperature, the cooler does an admirable job when it matters, dropping the delta T under load by 3°C compared to the reference model while also staying quieter.


We re-ran some tests following our overclocking efforts. Battlefield 3 was the most responsive to the improved clock speeds, showing a 9 percent improvement at 2,560 x 1,600. Meanwhile, the 1080p Crysis 3 framerates and Unigine Valley results went up by 4 and 5 percent respectively. As the card put more distance between itself and a stock GTX 770, it closed in further on the GTX 780 3GB. Unfortunately, however, the more powerful card was simply too far ahead to be caught, and still maintained a respectable lead. Power draw increased by 12W to 353W in this state (on par with GTX Titan), while temperatures rose to a delta T of just 56°C. The fan noise was notably louder, however, although not horribly so.

Conclusion

Although Nvidia's monopoly over the £300 price point will soon come to an end, for now the PNY GTX 770 XLR8 OC 2GB is a solid option for a non-reference card. For roughly a 10 percent price premium over stock models, you'll net yourself a card with about 7 percent more performance out of the box, a well designed and effective cooler and a healthy amount of extra overclocking headroom. As it stands then, it's a fair deal and a great choice if you're hunting for an upgrade in this segment of the market. However, with the market imminently set for a shake up with the release of AMD's Volcanic Islands GPUs, our advice is to hold out a month or two and see what impact they have before parting with the cash.