Gadgetory

I get any number of inquiries about which brand of video cards should I choose I want to get a GTX 580 or I want to get a Radeon 5770 what whatever whatever card you're looking at and you want to know which brand to choose so for the launch of the GTX 580 I happen to have the luxury of having two cards to compare so I have one from EVGA so this is an EVGA reference GTX 580 so you can see it uses the same cooler as the MSI GTX 580 it also uses the same PCB layout as the GTX 580 and I have a lot of people asking me like should I pick based on overclocking results in reviews or should I pick based on you know the the overall quality of the product well I can tell you one thing right now these are both reference design products especially when you buy a high end GPU at launch they are quite literally exactly the same thing there is no quality difference between an MSI GTX 580 and an EVGA GTX 580 none whatsoever so put that out of your mind so some of the ways that you can differentiate is in terms of the other ways that the brands differentiating each other from each other that's awkward anyway so MSI has a three year warranty and EVGA has a lifetime warranty if you register so there's one tick box for EVGA MSI's card actually comes with a slightly better accessory package although I do mean slightly it comes with a long HDMI cable about a six foot cable versus the EVGA one comes with one that's about this long so that's a mini HDMI to HDMI cable and the MSI one also comes with my preferred type of six pin to eight pin so it just has a single six pin on the one side that goes to a single 8 pin on the other side whereas EVGA uses one of those dual 6 pin 2 8 pin adapters that I'm not all that fond of now in terms of connectivity overclocking results etc etc it's all luck of the draw except remember these two are just reference products both of these manufacturers will release all kinds of different non-reference products so EVGA for example on the GTX 460 has their external exhaust version they've got any number of overclocked skew so that is they have GTX 460 s that are overclocked out of the box now you do pay a slight premium for them but that means that you're getting a higher speed bin and if you don't know what a speed bin is go ahead and check out my NCIX tech tips episode on the process of binning and that'll explain what that means but you're basically getting like a higher a higher graded chip okay because it passed at a higher speed you're getting yeah well basically that's it when you buy a factory overclocked card that's what you get and MSI also does some pretty unique solutions as well so you can see here I've actually got some MSI GTX 460 Hawke Edition cards so these guys have triple over voltage so it means you can over hold the GPU the RAM as well as the GPU PLL voltage so you can get some great overclocks it's actually got a switch on the back where is it right there where you can even change the voltages so that you can go even higher and get real crazy aftermarket coolers so uh oh yeah EVGA like I said they have their external exhaust coolers versus the reference one and my size about the Twin Frozr - they've got the cyclone all kinds of unique stuff that these particular vendors are doing now they also have some software differences although they aren't really differences EVGA is got their precision tool which is for overclocking and tweaking all that good stuff monitoring your temperatures fan speeds and MSI has afterburner which is a fairly similar utility now bear in mind that both EVGA and MSI have graciously allowed all other board partners to use their particular software so you can actually buy any card and use MSI Afterburner and the same goes for EVGA precision which is pretty cool of both of them to do that EVGA also has their 24/7 tech support as well as their where is the the terms and conditions for that one I believe they still do offer a trade-in program if something newer and after comes out so that you can now you can trade in your old card about some little bragging on the side of their box here which is definitely some interesting stuff there you go EVGA is number one and then looking you have on the msi box not a whole lot there so it's fine I mean these are reference cards so it becomes very difficult to differentiate so like I said I've brought up a bunch of different things that both of these brands do to separate their products from the other Nvidia partners for these particular cards is going to come down to what kind of price how much of a value you put on the the value adds that each of these board partners have attached to their GTX 580 and your personal preference because really nobody can tell you what experience you've had in the past with MSI or what experience you've had in the past with EVGA I mean there's all kinds of different factors like you could go oh I got an MSI motherboard and it's great so I want to buy an MSI product great good for you but that's no reason why you can't use an EVGA card on an MSI motherboard and similarly if you have an AMD chipset there's no reason you can't use an Nvidia card and the other way around you got an EVGA board you want to throw in maasai card in it no problem so there you go there's my little guide on EVGA vs MSI as far as being Nvidia and board partners and go oh yeah I should have probably mentioned my one of my personal favorite ways to pick video cards is based on the aesthetic of it you know whether you like the EVGA sticker or you like the the msi sticker better can actually make a difference to people and you can even run into differences a little bit later when we're not all using reference cards we're you know some will have a green PCB some will have a black PCB so so yeah and yeah like I said it's a goofy thing but that is actually something that factors in for me personally