PNY GeForce GTX 770 4GB XLR8 OC2

Introduction Introduction Since their inception the GTX 770 has always been a great choice for PC gaming enthusiasts who need more power than 660/760 video card can offer, but cannot justify the premium which accompanies NVIDIA's 'flagship' GTX 780 series. To put that another way they are for hardcore gamers who need more power than a GeForce '60 can offer but don’t want to entirely want to break their budgets getting that additional power. This is how it has been for many generations and how it was originally with the GeForce 700 series. With the release of the 780Ti and the ensuing downgrading of the 'standard' GTX 780, the 770s no longer seemed like the darling of the enthusiast community. Seemingly overnight those selfsame hardcore gamers on a budget could now afford the dethroned 'vanilla' GeForce GTX 780 cards. This meant that instead of getting a 1536 Cuda core enabled Kepler 'GK104' based card they could get a 2304 Cuda core Kepler GK110 card. Overnight the entire reason for the 770 seemed to evaporate and this has caught many manufactures flat footed. It appears it did not catch PNY flatfooted as they simply improvised, adapted and overcame in such a manner to make any drill sergeant proud. Instead of trying to make a GeForce GTX 770 that competed against the 780 simply on its lower price, they went back to the drawing board -just like they did with their GeForce 780 XLR8 OC- and redefined what consumers can expect to get from a 'mere' GeForce GTX 770 card. Instead of trading $100 for a lot less performance, PNY is promising consumers that they can trade $70 for only a small dip in performance. To do this PNY have binned their stock of GK104 chips and taken only the best for this OC2 Enthusiast Edition card. To these specially sorted chips they have applied a base clock speed of 1,150Mhz (with boost of 1202MHz) and paired this overclocked chip to double the standard amount of GDDR5 ram which has also been slightly boosted to an effective speed of 7,010MHz. To keep these hotter than usually components happy, PNY then gave their new creation a custom dual fan cooler. The end result of this hard work is the $420 PNY GeForce GTX 770 4GB XLR8 OC2 card. If these specifications sound familiar it is because they are only matched by a few other models, such as MSI's 770 'Lightening edition' or EVGA's 770 Dual Classified, and beaten by even fewer 'halo' models. However unlike most other factory overclocked 770's, this card comes gift wrapped with a lifetime warranty. This combination of performance and warrant is what PNY are counting on to change the price vs. performance equation back to the way it was before the 780Ti hit like a thunderbolt.

Specifications and Features Specifications and Features

A Closer Look at the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 A Closer Look at the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 Consumers would be hard pressed to tell the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2's box apart from PNY's PNY GeForce GTX 780Ti XLR8 we reviewed recently. In fact both shipping containers are dead ringers for each other and only the name printed on the side - and few details on the back - are changed. Of course anyone seriously intent on spending $400 on any device have already done their homework and know what they are buying before they reach the store, so this is a rather minor issue to say the least. On the positive side while this may increase consumer confusion this classic green and black box is a very nice shipping container. One which delicately treads that line between being bold & aggressive, vs. being garish bordering on outlandish. Also like the exterior, when you remove the internal packaging from the shipping container you can see that PNY has opted for the exact same plastic enclosure as their XLR8 780Ti model. This enclosure features a clear top and white bottomed plastic base which both secures the card and further helps reduces the chances of damage to the card happening while in transit. More importantly it doesn’t add much weight or increase the overall dimensions of the shipping container. Something that anyone ordering online will like as it will help keep shipping costs down. In what hopefully is the end of the similarities, the included accessories are a touch sparse. In fact, they are the same as which accompanies a XLR8 780 OC and the XLR8 780Ti models. In grand total you will get a single 8pin PCI-e adapter, a single digital to analog port adapter, a quick start guide and a CD with the necessary drivers for the 780Ti XLR8. Considering the more frugal price point of this card this is somewhat acceptable, but more value orientated or not we would have liked to have seen a much better and varied selection of accessories. On just a cursory glance the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 looks a lot like a scaled down version of the GeForce GTX 780 XLR8 OC and to a certain extent that is true. Both units have been paired with a custom heatsink, both use a single 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors, both have the same output selection, and come with tri-SLI capabilities. Both even have the same attractive and bold black with yellow racing stripes aesthetics. This however is where the similarities end and the to be perfectly candid these similarities are rather misleading as the 770 has been designed with different goals in mind from that of the 780 OC. First and foremost amongst the differences is the heatsink itself. While yes it is a 'down-draft' style cooler - rather than the stock NIVIDIA blower - the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2's relies upon two 90mm fans instead of two 80mm + one 90mm fan arrangement found on the XLR8 780 OC card. Also unlike its larger 780 OC brethren, the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 relies upon five 8mm heatpipes in one massive cooling tower configuration that runs the entire length and width of this card. While rather large and impressive looking, it is still smaller than the 780 OC's design and this smaller stature is reflected in the smaller footprint. Instead of an approximate 11.8 inches of room, this card only takes up 10.63 inches. By the same token the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 is still a rather large card and because of its longer than necessary cowling it is slightly longer than a stock GeForce GTX 780. On the positive side PNY was able to keep this custom cooler to a two slot form factor. This will make SLI'ing a pair - or more - of these cards a lot easier on most motherboards and the added room will help keep cool air reaching the fans. Also on the positive side the reason PNY made the cooler as long as they did is because they started with a blank slate. Instead of using the 770's stock PCB they instead opted for a custom PCB which can provide more clean and stable power for the GK104 core and Samsung DDR5 VRam. The engineers did this because they have pushed this card as hard and as fast as you are likely to find this side of custom 'one of' designs. Instead of a GK104 core which runs its 1536 Cuda Cores (with 32 ROPs and 128 Texture Units) at a base clock of 1046 and a boost clock of 1085, PNY have applied a [i double digit percentage[/i factory overclock and have their 770 XLR8 OC2 running with a base clock speed of 1150Mhz and a boost clock which tips the scales at 1202MHz! On the memory side of the equation, the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 still has - by necessity - a 256-bit bus but instead of having 2GB running at an effective speed of 7,000Mhz this card has four Gigabytes of DDR5 VRAM running at 7012MHz. This gives the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 a memory bandwidth of 224.3GB/s. While PNY have factory overclocked this card well beyond stock settings, they have been able to keep power requirements and TDP within check. As with a stock 770, the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 has a TDP of 230watts and requires only a single 6 and single 8 pin power connector. Interestingly enough instead of the typical side by side configuration PNY opted for the unusual stacked configuration with the 6-pin power port being slightly recessed from the bottom 8-pin. As mentioned previously the PNY have not messed with NIVIDIA's reference output selection. In fact this rear two slot bracket is reference NVIDIA through and through. This means the same selection of two DVI connectors stacked above the other, a single full size HDMI, and a single DisplayPort connector. Also like any reference design the rear exhaust ports consist of one row of vents plus two additional vents below the row. While some hot air will escape via these vents they are not entirely needed as this cooler is meant to exhaust the lion's share of heat inside your case. As such we would recommend a good case with good internal air flow. Doing otherwise will negate a lot of the benefits associated with custom coolers and this high performance card will thermally throttle itself within a safe operating temperature range. Oddly enough, PNY has once again decided against using a backplate for the PCB but they have also not included a backplate for the heatsink. This is odd as this is not a light heatsink and a metal reinforcing bracket around the core itself would have not raised an eyebrow. We assume PNY felt the stock screws did not need reinforcing, but it certainly is less than optimal nonetheless. Testing Methodology Testing Methodology To fully test the abilities of a given video card, we have used a blend of in-game benchmarks and custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have used FRAPS to record the minimum and average frame rates and to do so for a set period of time. All tests were run a minimum of four times and the scores are the average of all four runs. All games were patched to their latest version. The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied. All games were tested at the two of the most popular resolutions of 1080P (1920x1080) and then again at 1440P (2560x1440). This means each game’s tested was run a minimum of 8 times: 4 @ 1080P and 4 @1440P. Before testing Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card. This was done to ensure that long term performance and not short term performance is being illustrated. The games used for testing were: Sleeping Dogs Metro: Last Light BioShock Infinite Crysis 3 Batman: Arkham Origins Tomb Raider Battliefield 4 Assassins Creed: Black Flag Call of Duty: Ghosts For stress testing we used Unigine’s Valley benchmark. For overclocking we used either the manufactures included software overclocking program or if necessary EVGA’s Precision X program. Drivers: GeForce 332.21 Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 4770K Memory: 16GB GSkill 2666 Trident X CL11 1.6v Motherboard: MSI MPower Max Z87 Cooling: Corsair H100i SSD: 1x Seagate 600 Pro 400GB, 2x Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs. Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Synthetic Game Benchmarks Synthetic Game Benchmarks In the Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of benchmark comparisons of PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 and other comparable GPUs, using various benchmarks which come included with five popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance this card has to offer. To ensure that long term performance is and not short term performance is illustrated 15 minutes of Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run to ‘warm up’ the video card. Only then were any tests run on the now warm video card. Please Note: We will be very surprised if this 770 ever reaches above 'last place' as this is the most value orientated card in amongst a group of cards which cost significantly more than it. No, this card is not going to compete against the 780 and Titans of the industry on sheer performance for the simple reason it is not meant to! Rather this card is all about price vs. performance and it is with this radically different metric that we will be judging it performance results. Sleeping Dogs Gaming Benchmark Sleeping Dogs is an open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix, released on August 2012. Sleeping Dogs has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are the Extreme display settings and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. World density is set to extreme, Vsync disabled, high-res textures are enabled, and shadow resolution, shadow filtering, screen space ambient occlusion, and quality motion blur are all set to high. To be perfectly candid we were surprised to see how close the results between this overclocked GeForce GTX 770 and a stock 780 were. This is especially true at 1080P resolutions as the difference is only about 2.5 frames per second on the all-important minimum frames results! That is rather fantastic and just underscores how much extra power PNY have squeezed from the aging GK104. Color us impressed. Metro: Last Light Gaming Benchmark Metro: Last Light Gaming Benchmark Metro: Last Light is a DX11 first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver released in May 2013. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play. Scene D6 was used and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Very High for quality and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. DirectX 11 is used, texture filtering is set to AF 16X, motion blur is normal, SSA turned on and tessellation is set to high.

As with Sleeping Dogs even the indomitable Metro Last Light benchmark can't stop this card from exceeding our wildest expectations. At 1440P the average performance difference is rather noticeable but at 1080P and minimum frame rate performance at both resolutions the difference is only about 2FPS. That is about $35 per frame and while that is within the realm of 'reasonable' it certainly is closer than we thought it would be. We were expecting it to me more like $10 per additional frame and we thought the newer GK110 would walk all over the older GK104 - factory supercharging or not. BioShock Infinite Gaming Benchmark BioShock Infinite Gaming Benchmark BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, and published by 2K Games released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are UltraDX11 (option 3) for quality and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1800. Its combination of non-NVIIDA friendly optimizations and more stressful memory bandwidth limitations means this overclocked GeForce GTX 770 is able to pull within approximately 1.5FPS on the all-important minimum frame performance at both 1080 and 1440P of that of a stock 780. Of course, the average frames per second difference is still in the 4-5 range but that too is rather remarkable considering how many less CUDA cores the GK104 has to work with! Tomb Raider Gaming Benchmark Tomb Raider Gaming Benchmark Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game published by Square Enix and released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Ultimate default settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Unfortunately with Tomb Raider the GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2's result does fall back a step or two and the difference does nearly hit 3fps minimum and 6fps on the average. This translates into $23 per FPS minimum frame performance and $12fps average performance increase when comparing this GeForce GTX 770 to a stock 780. That is getting awfully close to making the 770 not worth the savings - but it still is enough to make it a tough decision! Batman Arkham Origins Gaming Benchmark Batman Arkham Origins Gaming Benchmark Batman: AO is an action-adventure video game published by Warner Bros and released in October 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Anti-Aliasing is set to TXAA (high). Motion blur, Distortion, Lens Flare, Light Shafts, and Reflections set to On. Geometry, Dynamic Shadows, Depth of Field, and Ambient Occlusion all set to DX11 Enhanced. Batman AO is another AMD Gaming Evolved title but unlike the other AMD centric games it appears that memory bandwidth or core speed is not as important as sheer number of cores. Because of this a vanilla GK110 found inside a stock GTX 780 post significantly better numbers than the overclocked GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2. With that being said this 770 is still within 4 frames on the minimum side of things and 5 on average FPS performance. That is not too shabby by any stretch of the imagination. Battlefield 4 Gaming Benchmark Real World In-Game Benchmarks In the Real Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of timed real world game play results using FRAPS and four popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 has to offer and do so in a way which cannot be unduly skewed by driver ‘optimizations’ which have been included for the sole purpose of improving benchmark results. While not as common as it once was such optimizing is still not unheard of by either AMD or NVIDIA. Once again Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card prior to testing. Battlefield 4 Gaming Benchmark Battlefield 4 is first person shooter video game, published by EA Digital Illusions CE and released in October 2013. Unlike most, this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming tests. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded the first 90 seconds of the single player Tashgar level. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Ultra pre-set for quality, with VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Well that certainly is interesting, it appears that the added 2GB of DDR5 VRAM actually comes in handy! Battlefield 4 is a notorious bandwidth hog so the combination of bigger, faster VRam combined and faster Cuda Cores means this GeForce GTX 770 is able to claw within 2 frames per second of the vanilla 780 at 1440P resolution. Assassins Creed: Black Flag Gaming Benchmark Assassins Creed: Black Flag Gaming Benchmark Assassins Creed: BF is an historical action-adventure video game, published by published by Ubisoft and released in October 2013. Like Battlefield 4 this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded a custom run through Havana’s marketplace. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Environment quality was set to very high, Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X, Ambient Occlusion set to HBAO+ (high), Shadow Quality set to ‘soft shadow’, Motion Blur and Volumetric Blur both set to On. Texture Quality, Reflection Quality, and God Rays all set to High. Well it appears that the BF4 was not the start of trend and was simply a blimp on the radar. As with most of the other tests the 1440P results are certainly an extra step back from the stock 780s numbers; however on the positive side the 1080P results are very, very respectable and we doubt most would notice the difference between what the 770 XLR8 OC2 and a stock 780 can do! Call of Duty: Ghosts Gaming Benchmark Call of Duty: Ghosts Gaming Benchmark Call of Duty: Ghosts is a first person shooter video game, published by Activision and released in October 2013. Since it does not include an in-game benchmark, it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Ghost Stories' level, starting as soon as we resume control of Logan back on Earth. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Image Quality, Textures Resolution, Normal Map Resolution, and Specular Map Resolution set to Extra. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Antistrophic Filtering set to High, Terrain Detail set to ON, and Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X. With Shadows, Distortion, Motion Blue and Depth of Field set to Yes.

Call of Duty Ghosts actually gave us the closest results of any test. At 1080P resolutions a mere 1FPS on the minimum is all that separates the XLR8 OC2 770 from a stock 780! Of course there was over 4FPS on the average separating the two, but unless you are looking for a constant 60FPS we doubt anyone would notice a difference between these two cards. At 1440P the difference is more noticeable but once again the differences are not significant enough to justify the 780 seventy five dollar difference between this overclocked 770 and the stock 780. Crysis 3 Gaming Benchmark Crysis 3 Gaming Benchmark Crysis 3 is a first person shooter video game, published by Electronic Arts and released in February 2013. While older than some of the others it is one of the most visually stunning games released to date and puts a lot of demands on the GPU. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Post Human' level, starting as soon as soon as prophet is handed a Hammer II pistol by Psycho. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Texture Quality, Game Effects, Objects, Particles, Post Processing, Shadows, Shading, Water, and System Specs all set to Very High. Motion Blur was set to High and Lens Flare was set to On. Anti-Aliasing was set to MSAA 8X and Antistrophic Filtering was set to 16x. Crysis 3 is hard on video cards and while we would want to turn the post-processing down a good bit, the XLR8 OC2 does do a respectable job at keeping up with a 780. Both at 1440P are more slideshow than fast paced action, but then again so too is a stock 780s results. At 1080P both do close enough to each other that it would be hard to justify the additional $75 dollars and people would be better served thinking about a XRL8 780 OC - which of course costs even more than this 770 OC2! Temperature, Noise, and Power Analysis Video Card Temperature Results [size=18pt Video Card Temperature Results[/size For all temperature testing the cards were used in an open test bed environment. Ambient temperature was kept at a constant 20°C (+/- 0.5°C) and if the ambient room temperatures rose above 21°C or dropped below 19°C at any time, all benchmarking was stopped until proper temperatures could normalized. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak temperature. For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes. Heavy factory overclock or not this dual slot custom cooler does an admirable job at keep the card down right happy. Though we can only imagine how much cooler it would have been, if PNY have been willing to use the 780 XLR8 OC's three fan cooler. In either case this is still a relatively cool running card. Sound Level Test Results Sound Level Test Results While everyone "hears" noise differently there is one easy way to remove all subjectivness and easily compare different fans: use a sound level meter. This way you can easily compare the various fans noise envelopes without us colouring the results and see what fans fit within your personal comfort level. Of course, we will endeavor to try and explain the various results - which are taken at a 15 inch distance from the GPU’s fan(s) - to help you gain an even better understanding of how loud a cooler's stock fan is, but even if you discount our personal opinions, the fact remains numbers don't lie. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak dB. For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes and recorded the peak dB. Unlike the power usage results, no one will complain about the noise levels this card has to offer. It may not be the absolute quietest GeForce card we have ever tested but that custom dual fan equipped cooler is still whisper silent. System Power Consumption System Power Consumption To obtain accurate results we have connected the system to a Power Angle power meter that has in turn been attached to a 1500watt UPS. This ensures only 120volt power is supplied to the PSU and removes an variances that could potential crop up because of brownouts and power spikes. In order to stress the video card we have once again used Unigine’s Valley benchmark and ran it for 20 minutes to determine peak system power consumption. For idle results we have let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak idle power consumption. Even though this is a heavily overclocked version of the GeForce GTX 770, the GK104 core does require less power than a GK110. With that being said the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 is rather power hungry by 770 standards. This means you certainly will not be opting for this card over a 780 because of power savings! Thankfully, the OC2 doesn’t need any help in this regards as the real world performance does do an admirably job all on its own. Overclocking Overclocking To discover our PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 sample’s overclocking abilities we used EVGA’s Precision X software and began raising power and thermal thresholds to the maximum allowed and then increased the voltage also to the maximum permitted. Then using Unigine’s Valley benchmark we began stability testing. It came as almost no surprise that there was not much room left for further overclocking over what PNY has already applied to this heavily overclocked card. On the positive side, even highly overclocked 770s will still run into performance issues long before VRam really becomes an issue, but the extra 2GB certainly did not hinder performance all that much. If you are interested in manual overclocking the higher density DDR5 RAM's headroom will be lower than the DDR5 found on the 2GB model, but it really was the lack of voltage headroom on the GK104 that held things back, rather than the VRAM per say. With that being said we were able to boost performance further than we thought on both the RAM and GK104. Thanks to the excellent factory cooler PNY has used, we were able to reach a base clock of 1,210MHz -or an additional 60Mhz over the factory overclock. This is an additional 5.2% increase on the already impressive factory overclocking settings and a whopping 164Mhz increased over a reference GeForce GTX 770's levels. Put another way, when manually overclocked this GK104 runs 15.7% faster than a GK104 found in a reference GeForce 770. On the memory side of the equation we were able to boost the memory to an effective 7448Mhz, which is a 6.2 percent improvement over the card’s default 7012Mhz - and excellent 448MHz boost over a reference 770's settings. With only a minor-to-moderate increase in speeds the only minor increase in real world performance was expected. With that being said the improvement is tangible and does add frames per second to the bottom line. More impressive still, this GeForce GTX 770 was able to claw within striking distance of a stock 780 on the all-important minimum frame rates! Seventy dollars for a single additional FPS definitely doesn't sound like all that great a deal to us. Score Card, Summary and TL;DR Performance Summary and TL;DR In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the game results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 to its similar products in all the games you will be able to easily find the game(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 is the worth the investment. Score Card and Summary Packaging & Accessories: 9 out of 10. The shipping container may not be the flashiest of boxes we have ever seen, but it is still aesthetically pleasing and offers good protection to the card while in transit. More importantly finding room to store this box - in case you need to RMA this lifetime warrantied card - will be a snap. The only issues on this front is PNY has once again opted for a rather sparse accessory list and one that certainly doesn’t live up to the standards “Enthusiast Edition” infers. Luckily, the card itself does the talking for it and takes care of any such concerns! Functionality & Aesthetics: 18 out of 20 As with its bigger brother - the excellent 780 XLR8 OC - the PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 looks as impressive as it performs. The very fact that the PNY engineers were able to do this while still keeping length in check is rather remarkable. The only possible issues anyone will take is that opting for two fans instead of three does slightly increase the noise profile of the card and the black and gold racing stripes may not be to everyone's liking. Build Quality & Warranty: 19 out of 20 PNY spent a lot of time and effort making their 770 the best it could possibly be and it shows. While water cooling enthusiasts may not be overjoyed by the use of a custom PCB, most consumers will love what PNY were able to do. The end result is a beefy card that should last a long, long time. When you add in the lifetime warranty to the equation there really is not much to dislike about this card from this POV. Performance: 26 out of 30 A very good and quiet cooler with a downright amazing overclock makes this GeForce GTX 770 one heck of a performer. If you use a 1080P resolution monitor you will love what this GPU can do. At this resolution we were amazed at how close it consistently came our stock 780s performance results and considering the older GPU it uses that is a rather remarkable feat. With that being said there is only so much that can be done with the older GK104 core and heavily overclocked or not it does start to lose a step at higher resolutions. In either case, the added 2GB of RAM is not going to be that much of a benefit outside of very niche cases as the GK104 will bottleneck results long before modern games need it, but from a performance perspective it certainly does not hurt the 770 OC2 to have it either! Value: 18 out of 20 That selfsame combination of excellent cooling, very good performance and a lifetime warranty makes this card a remarkably good value. While yes it certainly does cost more than what a stock GeForce GTX 770 demands the extra expense is money well spent considering this 770 can almost compete with the 780s of the marketplace. The only fault that can be found with this card is the fact that the extra 2GB of DDR5 Ram does come with a price premium that is out of sync with the performance benefits it has to offer and the 2GB version of the 770 XLR8 OC2 would be an even better value. Final Score: 90 out of 100 From its lifetime warranty, to excellent factory cooler to the impressive real world performance everything about this card screams excellent value for lower resolution gaming enthusiasts. At lower resolutions this highly overclocked GK104 is almost able to keep up with a GTX 780 and it is only at higher resolutions that the older - but higher clocked - GK104 will show its age. At higher resolutions the disparity in price vs. performance is not all that great and a good argument could be made for opting for either a stock 780 or this PNY GeForce GTX 770 XLR8 OC2 card. The very fact that any 770 can once again make it a tough decision is actually impressive considering the new lower price point of the standard GeForce GTX 780s! Closing Statement Closing Statement With a real world price tag of $429 backstopped by rather good performance, PC gaming enthusiasts are once again going to have to ask themselves if the extra cost of a GeForce GTX 780 is worth it. Unlike the 780 OC we recently reviewed the answer to this critical question is not blatantly obvious and a good argument could be made for going in either direction. Simply put this card is great example of what can be done with , and to the older GK104 chip, but it still is a Kepler GK104 based video card in a market filled with GK110 cards. The easiest way to sum up this card is instead of comparing it to a stealthy assassin or monster masher that its higher priced brethren can be compared to, the PNY GeForce GTX 770 4GB XLR8 OC2 is more like as steadfast companion. A companion that you can count on to do Yeoman's work, day in and day out for the foreseeable future. Sadly just like the Yoeman of yore, opting for it certainly will not net you the fame or envy from friends like the more expensive options would, but it will keep a bit more 'gold' in your pocket. Unfortunately, great example and good performer aside, the amount of headroom left for enthusiasts to find and exploit is rather slim. PNY has wrung nearly every ounce of performance they could and we were a bit disappointed with the manual overclocking results. More to the point, it is a good card in its own right and one that can nip at the heels of what a reference design, GK110 based GeForce GTX 780 can do, but because NVIDIA has limited the additional voltage that can be applied, even with extra TLC these cards will never surpass even a stock GeForce GTX 780's level of performance. That is the crux of the issue with this card and strikes to the very heart of the matter: PNY do have a good performer on their hands but you will be trading performance for the lower asking price. The amount of performance you give up will depend largely on the resolution you game at, but you will be giving up performance to get the lower asking price. In the end this is a good enthusiast grade card, but it is a card that will not be right for everybody. However anyone who does choose to save the $70 and purchase the XLR8 770 OC2 instead of a GTX 780 will be rewarded with a great gaming experience. Conversely those who opt to spend more for a reference GTX 780 will always be wondering if they made the right decision. The very fact that a 770 can once again make it an agonizing decision is in and of itself very impressive. At its new low, low asking price the PNY GTX 770 4GB XLR8 OC2 is a very good value and if it ever dips down below the $400 mark it will be a great value.