****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
So I bought this card as a replacement for an aging Radeon HD 7850, which was a good card, but was starting to get noticeably long in the tooth. In my foolishness, I believed that my power supply, an Ultra LSP 750, would be sufficient to power the new MSI 970; It wasn't. Within a day the dogpile Ultra called a power supply had blown at least one capacitor, the familiar ozone reek of dead electronics hanging in the air around my computer. Thank Computer Jesus the dogpile had the decency not to nuke the video card or burn down my house in a final display of defiance.After rush shipping a new CoolerMaster V750 Power Supply (which is amazing for its price) I was introduced to a new level of heavenly gaming, but there was one more roadblock before I could call the purchase perfectly adequate. As is currently displayed on the pages on most new GeForce GTX and Titan cards, purchasers are entitled to a free copy of the highly-anticipated and recently released game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. That wasn't always so.You see, when I ordered my GTX 970 100 Million Edition, the bundled game was the Broken-on-Release crapstravaganza Batman: Arkham Knight. In the week it took the video card to ship, be installed, kill my power supply and be paired with a new one, the bundled game changed to MGSV.Batman, I could take or leave. But I frickin' LOVE me some Metal Gear. I just couldn't let it go!So, with a head full of steam, I got on the phone with the retailer: Amazon. Amazon Customer Support was on top of their game. I figured the best-case scenario would be receiving an MGSV product key, but that wasn't in the cards Lady Fate dealt me. That day, she would be kinder, whispering into the Amazon representative's ear to extend me a 20% rebate charged back to my payment method. That's 68 bucks, 8 bucks more than the cost of MGSV on Steam, and bringing the total cost of this 970 to $272. Keep that number in mind; It'll be important later. My Amazon rep that day will surely be gifted his 40 virgins in the afterlife.MSI's normal, not special edition Twin Frozr V 970 is highly regarded as one of the best 970s for overclocking, easily hitting 1500MHz on its core and 1800MHz on VRAM. What this means to the layman is that it's so fast it runs most modern games (especially well-optimized titles like MGSV) at 1080p60 without breaking a sweat, and when it does sweat MSI's cooling solution keeps them cool very quietly. In fact, overclocking performance is so good that it puts it within striking distance of the GTX 980's stock performance.However, AMD recently leapfrogged the GTX 970's performance at the $320-$350 price point with the release of the Radeon R9 390. In terms of price to performance, I can't recommend the 970 if you have $340 to spend on a GPU.At $272, however, the MSI GTX 970 100 Million Edition destroys the competition outright.With all that in mind, what else is there to say? Well, the 100ME has a backplate and green LED lighting matching the heatsink's fairings. The backplate alone is great! The sheet metal on the IO area is stamped "DRAGON ARMY," which sounds metal af. Too bad it doesn't match anything in my rig, but since that's the worst I can say, I'm thoroughly pleased with my purchase.
