They’re certainly easy enough install – the heatsinks have a thin layer of thermal tape that adheres to the RAM module. I had some cheap aluminum VGA heatsinks laying around from other projects and decided to give them a shot. Okay, but would VGA RAM heatsinks even help in this situation? I’ve only been able to see the back of the card on tech review sites like. It’s actually kind of funny – nowhere on MSI’s product page for the GTX 970 Gaming 4G do they show the rear of the card – see for yourself. Then while I was installing a new SSD in my case I realized that the RAM modules on the back of the card had no heatsinks on them. I left the lower clocks for a while just under the assumption that the card couldn’t handle the high clocks that I set. I dropped the memory overclock slightly in MSI Afterburner without touching the core clock and noticed the artifacting was gone. Having done a lot of GPU overclocking in the past, I assumed it was because of overheating memory. However, when I fired up Shadows of Mordor and played for an hour or so, I noticed that I was getting some GPU artifacs on-screen. This worked fine with no apparent issues for older games like Counter-Strike Source, or Left 4 Dead 2 since they don’t push modern GPUs much. The clocks that I started out with were 110 Power Limit, +150 Core Clock, and +450 Memory Clock. It ran so smooth that I figured that my monitor was out of date, I quickly found the best gaming monitor reviews and went to the store for a bigger, better screen. I don’t think I had my GTX 970 installed for more than 5 minutes before I had overclock settings applied in MSI Afterburner. You can find your model on the video card’s box as part of the serial number. This post pertains to the 09SB version of the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G video card, but may also apply to other models.

Msi afterburner gtx 970