Palit GeForce GTX 770 Review

The NVIDIA GTX 770 reference design looked very similar to the GTX 780 – which again looked similar to the GTX TITAN before it. After having tested the custom-cooler sporting the ZOTAC GTX 770 AMP Edition, we got another custom GTX 770 in our labs from Palit called the Palit Jetstream GeForce GTX 770.The JetStream series was introduced last year with the GTX 680 and represents a factory-overclocked card with Palit’s custom cooling added in.

Design and build

The Palit JetStream GTX 770 has a custom cooler design visually different from the reference GTX 770 design that resembles the flagship single GPU GTX TITAN. Palit has decided to go with a three-fan active cooling setup. Within the black-coloured plastic shroud you have an aluminium heat-sink that helps in dissipating heat away from the GPU.

The shroud around the central fan tends to protrude out on the top

There are two separate blocks of heatsinks joined by two copper tubes. Atop the heatsinks, you have three fans – a central 90 mm one surrounded by two 80 mm ones on the sides. There is some light brown colouring on the shroud in the area around the central fan. The shroud also tends to protrude out a bit from the centre. Palit has added some LED bling on the central fan. The quality of the shroud was not the best as we noticed that it would flex on applying minor pressure.

There is no backplate covering the circuitry on the rear side and there is one eight-pin and one six-pin PCIe power connector on the right hand side. Palit hasn’t changed the arrangement of the display ports from the stock GTX 770 and you have two DVI ports along with an HDMI and a DisplayPort. The card measures 254 x112 mm and appears quite massive at first glance. Safe to say that it will block the two PCIe slots beside it on your motherboard.

Features

Palit JetStream GTX 770 sports three fans - a central 90mm one, surrounded by two 80mm ones.

The JetStream GTX 770 is a factory-overclocked card with base clock touching 1150MHz and Boost clock at 1202MHz up from 1046MHz base clock and 1084MHz Boost clock combo on the reference card. It sports 2GB of GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit memory bus-width. It packs in the same 1536 CUDA cores and 32 ROPs. Other features are similar to what you get in the GTX 780, such as GPU Boost 2.0, advanced AA modes (TXAA and FXAA) as well as full support for Shadow Play.

The rear side of the card does not have any backplate

Testbench
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC Formula
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB (4GB x 2) @1600MHz
Storage: Plextor PX-256M2S SSD (boot drive)
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 850W
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Performance
3DMark 11

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the “Performance” preset for this benchmark.

Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geometrics’ Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the “Ultra High” preset, Post AA – High, Blur – Full, Field of View – 90, Level – “Fear no Evil”.

Crysis 2

Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and is based on the new CryEngine 3. Just like the first iteration of the game, Crysis 2 continues to be one of the best-looking shooters to date. The settings used for this benchmark were “Ultra High” preset in Adrenalin, DX11 and High-resolution texture patch.

Dirt 3  

Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. The game is extremely scalable and features DX11 tessellation effects. We used the built-in benchmark tool, along with “Ultra” quality preset.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter video game that continues to bring even the toughest graphics cards down to their knees. The game has a lot of DX11 eye-candy, which really puts a strain on any GPU. All DX11 features were enabled for the benchmark and we used the “Tower” level for our test.

Verdict and Price in India
At an MOP of Rs 35,000, it is still around Rs 3,000 higher than the ZOTAC GTX 770 AMP Edition card, which is a slightly better performer. The only advantage the Palit card has is its cooler operating temperatures and lower noise levels as compared to the ZOTAC GTX 770. The load temperature was under 75 degrees C and the fan noise was minimal while on load. As compared to the GTX 680, you get around 10 to 15 percent improvement. So if low noise levels and cool operating temperatures is what you are after, you can consider paying a premium for this, otherwise opt for the ZOTAC card.