Reference GTX 760 watercooled vs. MSI GTX 760 Hawk?

Barney6262 · Nov 11, 2013

i am surrently building a new system for gaming.

i was wondering, seeing as i am already planning to water cool my cpu with an open loop i have a difficult choice to make for GPUs:

get a reference GTX 760 and an EK GTX 760 water block for about £250 in total (Maybe a bit more)

OR

Get an MSI GTX 760 Hawk which is air cooled by a twin frozer V. this would be about £220, £30 cheaper.

Which one would give a higher overclock with MSI after burner? even though the Hawk is clocked higher to start with i dont know if it allows it to be over clocked higher too...

Any suggestions for imporvements (E.g. better water blocks or GPUs) are also appreciated

Basically.would it be worth the extra risk and cost to go with the water cooling option instead of the hawk, after overclocking?

Thanks for any help/input

vmem · Nov 11, 2013

the reference 760 would go higher. this has to do with GPU ASIC quality, or application specific integrated circuit quality.

in short, the higher quality chips are able to hit higher clocks at lower voltage, but are less tolerant of higher voltages being used on them. if you plan on using water cooling, you want a chip with lower ASIC quality so you can shoot lots of juice into it and hit those really high clocks. reference chips typically have the lowest ASIC quality.

Barney6262 · Nov 12, 2013

Thanks for the detailed answer.
I was wondering if the reference card would produce such a high over clock it would be worth the extra money for it?

vmem · Nov 12, 2013

Barney6262 :

generally no, it is rare for a person to hit a high enough OC on water for there to be a noticeable difference between the water-cooled card and a high-end air cooled GPU. I'd guess the performance difference to be 1-5% in the average case. the chief advantage of water cooling is that you'll be keeping your temperatures and noise low compared to air cooling, and you won't have throttling issues since your GPU should never be hitting the temperature safety limit.

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Reference GTX 760 watercooled vs. MSI GTX 760 Hawk?

Barney6262

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vmem

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Barney6262

Honorable

vmem

Splendid

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