Introduction

You might wonder why we'd bother looking at the reference GTX 570 when we've already had a look at an option from Gainward which carried with it both an overclock and a new cooler.

Well, the reason is simple - While the Gainward card is good, it doesn't offer the truest form of GTX 570, as it's got a bigger cooler, an overclock and a higher price tag. What it ends up doing is skewing everything for us and it makes it a little difficult to tell you exactly how one model compares directly against it.

So with the MSI reference design on offer, which is still the most popular design a month and a bit on since launch, we'll see how exactly the GTX 570 sits in our TPR and TVR graphs, while also seeing how it compares to other reference card offerings from AMD and NVIDIA.

Before we get stuck into the card itself, though, we'll check out the package that MSI has put together. Once that's done we'll get into the card, specifications and then of course the fun stuff; the benchmarking.

Package

The package is very MSI with no real surprises going on. We've got the white box which looks nice and offers us the Afterburner name on the front, which of course coincides with MSIs own overclocking software.

Inside there's nothing too fancy going on with the normal paperwork and driver CD present. We've also got two Dual-Molex to 6-Pin PCI-E connectors along with a single DVI to VGA and Mini HDMI to HDMI convertors.