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Hey, this is Lachlan “Phoenix” Leslie – I’m a member of SYF GAMING’s Starcraft 2 Division. Over the last month or so I’ve been taking a close look at MSI GTX 960 100 Million Edition card. The GTX 960 is part of NVIDIA’s latest line of graphics cards, the 960 being the mid-range card. The 100 ME edition looks to add a bump in performance from the reference 960 card. The special green colouring celebrates the partnership of 100 million cards being made together between NVIDIA and MSI. MSI’s variant of the stock card tries to offer a boost in the cooling of the card with the ever better Twin Frozr V! This cooler seeks to provide you with quiet but efficient cooling to help the card run smoothly under the biggest of load. This extra cooling gives way for room to push 2GB of GDDR5 memory to its limits.


Under any circumstance, all gamers know performance is key to performing at your best. Like every other gamer I always try my best to play my best, but if my game does not run smoothly it can sometimes be tough to focus and perform my best. I was eager to try out MSI’s GTX 960 100 ME and see what it had to offer.




Looking at the box, on the front you're greeted by the sleek green design of the card along with the announcement that this card is the 100 ME edition, there to celebrate 100 million cards made between NVIDIA and MSI. Flipping to the back you're confronted with all the features on offer from this card with a main emphasis on 'next gen gaming features' Like the TORX fans used by the Twin Frozr V, the SuperSU heat pipes and the gaming App. Upon opening up the box you’re greeted by the card snugly fit within foam and in an anti-static bag, once removed from the foam and bag. As well at the card in the box it includes; Driver CD, quick user guide, a manual, as well as two dual molex 6-pin PCIe power connectors, DVI to VGA adaptor.

After removing the card from it’s protected position in the box the first thing you notice is the Massive Twin Frozr V which covers the entire face of the card itself, with it's sleek green design and the MSI logo and motif on either of the 10cm fans. Along the side of the card you'll notice the shiny chrome SuperSU heat pipes used to help distribute heat and the 8 pin connector. On back end with the faceplate you'll see all the connection point for the card. It has a single dual link DVI input, one HDMI input and 3x display ports. On the underside of the card you'll find the backplate that covers the chip itself.














When looking at the performance I get from a card I usually want to see around 60 fps for me to play a game smoothly, depending on the game itself of course. 60 Frames per second gives a fluent and smooth feel as you play the game. The minimum sort of result I’d feel acceptable to play a game from a card is around 30 Frames per second; any lower the game starts to feel disjointed, jarring and lack fluidity. The games I chose to test the GTX 960 100ME with were all cranked up to max settings with 1920x1080 resolution.

First, I test the card out using Ungine Heaven benchmark 4.0, a GPU-intensive benchmark program designed to fully stress every aspect of your graphics card. After I ran it through a full benchmark is came out with an average FPS of 30.4 and a benchmark score of 766 with a maximum fps of 66 and a minimum of 19.2. Once I had fiddled with MSI’s Afterburner software and pushed the card as far as I could without risking the life of the card it showed some pretty impressive improvements getting an average FPS of 34.9 an impressive 15% increase on previous. It also achieved a benchmark score of 879 over 100 points higher than previously with a maximum FPS of 76 and minimum FPS of 22.9.




Metro: Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. The Rangers have since occupied the D6 military facility, with Artyom having become an official member of the group. Khan, the nomad mystic, arrives at D6 to inform Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike. Khan believes the Dark One is the key to humanity's future, and wants to make peace with it, while Ranger leader Colonel Miller wants to kill the creature due to its potential threat. Miller sends Artyom to the surface with a mission to kill the Dark One; he is accompanied by Anna, Miller's sarcastic daughter and the Rangers' best sniper.

The core gameplay of Sleeping Dogs consists of giving the player an open world environment in which to move around freely. Sleeping Dogs is played as an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective action-adventure game with roleplaying elements. The player controls Wei Shen, a Chinese-American police officer, as he goes undercover to infiltrate the Sun On Yee Triad organization. On foot, the player character has the ability to walk, run, jump, climb over obstacles and swim, as well as use weapons and martial arts in combat. Players also drive a variety of vehicles including cars, boats, and motorcycles.

Battlefield 4 (also known as BF4) is an upcoming first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts. The game is a sequel to 2011's Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 features several changes compared to its predecessor. The game's heads-up display is much the same, composed of two compact rectangles. The lower left-hand corner features a mini-map and compass for navigation and a simplified objective notice above it; the lower right includes a compact ammo counter and health meter. The mini-map, as well as the main game screen, shows symbols marking three kinds of entities: blue for allies, green for squadmates, and red/orange for enemies.

CS:GO (Counter Strike: Global Offensive) created by Valve Corporation is an online FPS game that combines tactical team play with raw aiming skill. It exploded into the gaming scene in August 2012, since then it has grown exponentially and is now considered one of the most widely played and viewed ‘E-sports’ in the world.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is the third installment in the series co-created by Bioware and Electronic Arts. It is a third person role playing game that takes you into a fantasy countries of Ferelden and Orlais.

Assassins Creed : Unity is the latest installment in the series of historical third person role playing games where you take on the bloodline of some of the most famous assassins in history. This time you take the role of Arno Dorian as he explores Paris.

Looking at the results of the testing on each game it was only the very taxing Assassins Creed: Unity that was basically unplayable on the highest of setting only managing to get a dismal average of only 18 FPS, but excluding that, this card destroyed just about every other game I tested it with on max settings and 1920x1080 resolution, managing to get around 55~ average FPS in most recent games, but slightly dipping to 34 with Dragon Age: Inquisition. Still impressively for this mid range GPU it has performed magnificently given the tasks I’ve put in front of it. I would gladly purchase one of these if I was looking for a mid-range card to put in my machine.

During all the testing I left the fan speed for the card on auto and I never saw it go above 30% even when stretched to the max. Impressively I never noticed any increase in the sound output from the fan the whole time. I decided to crank it to 100% for a short 5 second burst to see if there was any difference and once again I had my mind blown by how quiet the latest generation of the Twin Frozr cooler was. Even when at 100% I had to move closer to my tower to notice any difference in the noise level. When I looked at the temperatures they never went above 62 degrees even after overclocking. This lead me to the conclusion that the Twin Frozr V isn’t just quiet, it’s astonishingly effective at keeping temperatures low. The MSI GTX 960 100ME is honestly one of the nicest cards I’ve had the pleasure of using; it is quiet, cool, but still provides the performance required to play almost every single recent game with the highest of settings.

Again I’m not the most experienced overclocker, especially when it comes to GPUs, but with some advice from experts and a little patience I was able to get a really impressive extra 110 MHz extra on the core clock, and 500 extra MHz on the memory clock pushing the card to an impressive 1414 boost core clock and the memory clock to 7510 Mhz at its base voltage. One thing I would like to stress is how easy and safe the MSI Afterburner software is if you do a little bit of research and ask for some basic help. It was clean and easy to use, just what a inexperienced overclocker like me needs. Through the whole process the Twin Frozr V kept the temperatures low, only reaching a max of 62 degrees and only ever getting to 30% of it’s full speed, while staying extremely quiet.











Coming in at around $329 the MSI GTX 960 100ME is toward the higher price range of 960 cards, but is it worth the extra $30~ish dollar from the other cards? That’s what I’m going to try convince you of, this card is beautifully crafted, it performs efficiently, quietly, and it doesn’t get hot under the collar like other cards, I would say it is well worth that little bit of extra cash to get that Sleek green Twin Frozr V cooler and the extra power that MSI has been able to eek out of the card, plus on top of that you have the potential to push the card even further like I did and get even more performance, but even if you’re not willing to delve into overclocking the extra performance it has over other cards of similar price is well worth it. With how simple overclocking with MSI’s Afterburner program is though I would highly recommend doing an hour or two of research and trying to push your card that 10% or so more, you’d be surprised how good it is.

To sum up, this card is a perfect addition to any system. It may not be a Titan X but it has the necessary power to play just about every game on the market on high settings and still be playable. It’s an excellent choice for anyone looking for a mid range card, but still wish to be able to play high end games without forking out $1000 for graphics cards. On top of all this you get a free Far Cry 4 mouse pad to boot, who doesn’t want a free mouse pad?!