PNY XLR8 GTX 770 Enthusiast Edition Graphics Card Review

Conclusion

From a hardware point of view, it’s a nice card. Standard video memory capacity with standard memory and core speeds do not set this apart from any other reference card. What does is the three fan cooler. Heat has not been an issue and neither has noise. In our unscientific tests we noted a rough average of 38 decibels during gaming and whisper quiet under desktop conditions.

This also means the card appeared to handle getting hot really well which has been our general perception. We haven’t overclocked this card so far but we intend to push core and memory speeds once we verify the BIOS and understand what we can do with it.

Package and Bundle

Though it has a very nice box, and is styled in a nice way, we found nothing stand out about the packaging and bundle included. The Watch_Dogs promotion was an NVidia initiative and not part of PNY’s bundled product. If we are going to be honest, I don’t think it matters, if we can keep the cost of graphics cards cheaper because we have a lean bundle, or the absolute minimum then we are all for it.

Synthetic Tests

Synthetic tests on this card are decent. We only really ran them to represent this card in the larger world, and it does hold up. Take what you will from the synthetic results but understand we use a mid-range test rig, we find it gives a good representation for the average user. We did notice a little capacitor noise during synthetic tests but not during gaming tests; a but odd.

Gaming Tests

During the gaming tests we have been really impressed. We ran more than Watch_Dogs and Battlefield 4 when testing. We ran Crysis 3 and Titanfall also, with Crysis 3 looking fantastic in the High Quality runs, though the frame rate struggled to get about 25 FPS. Titanfall on the other hand ran smoothly with FPS above 30 with high spikes and topping out with a constant 40FPS at times.

It looked amazing in the High Quality tests as well. Battlefield 4 was another test that ran well in both Low and High Quality tests. This was online multi player on an official server for 360 seconds over two runs. The game play was smooth and it looked good without frame rate drops or issues when playing. Watch_Dogs is a killer however when playing the High Quality settings. Unplayable on the most part with lag at the best of times.

Watch_Dogs generally was handled well by the PNY XLR8 GeForce GTX 770 though stay away from higher resolutions with high quality settings and you will be fine. We did test everything at a higher resolution of 2048 X 1152 native so if you are looking for 1080p you may find more headroom when maxing out your settings.

Final Thoughts

Overall we think this is an excellent card for the price, and although with the NVidia 8xx GTX (or 9xx GTX) just around the corner we don’t really see a reason to run out and upgrade if you had a card like this. This is the main conclusion we came too after running and reviewing this card. There is always a sweet spot card, CPU or even memory in a product range.

This is the best price but with better performance than the product just below and not too far off the higher end products miles above. We think this card, and possibly all GTX 770’s, are exactly that; a perfect price and performance point product.

PNY XLR8 GTX 770 Enthusiast Edition