I've used both, and while once a longtime MSI Afterburner fan, since now all I purchase are NVIDIA cards of the EVGA brand, why not give EVGA Precision X a fair shake?
Neither are perfect, nor do I expect this, overclocking is a type of art, some has the skills to do it, others doesn't, regardless of which choice used, there's more involved other than bumping up the core & memory clocks. One must keep in mind to be careful with the voltages, if going too far out of line can destroy a card & I doubt that any brand will cover such damages.
The only time I use Afterburner today is on a single AMD card, a MSI Radeon 7770 GHz edition (PDM1GD5), and use the app conservatively, as the card is already OC'd out of the box. Not that great of a card either, took apart for cleaning/repasting, required all of 15 minutes to perform the entire job, as those 4 screws were all that had to be removed. Very light & thin aluminum cooler, no copper, and the thermal paste, while still moist, was everywhere, all that was needed on the chip was the 'dot' method, which I did with AC5. That would be my first & last AMD card, although with the NVIDIA 960 release, once again went with MSI, should had paid the extra $40 for the 4GB version, as the card itself, while not heavy, was bulky & scraped my knuckles getting it in my XPS 8700.
Two years later, replaced with a EVGA GTX 1060 SSC (by then my 3rd EVGA card), and it dropped right in, although heavy, wasn't bulky plastic & no troubles with install. My first EVGA was the 1070 FTW + ACX 3.0 & 2nd was the 1060 FTW + ACX 3.0 (the SSC has the same cooling feature). So for me, it makes perfect since to use EVGA's software to manage my NVIDIA GPU's. Secondly, as consumers, we can report bugs to EVGA & am sure that if a certain number or percentage of users are reporting the same issue, will be looked into & corrected with the next release.
Finally IMO, EVGA Precision X simply looks better, and is highly functional, is used to control the color effects of the cards, in addition to any overclocking usages. I mainly use the software to monitor the GPU's rather than OC, because all three of my EVGA cards has been OC'd at the factory & each were tested before packaging. While one may get a little more out of these already tuned cards, chances are it won't be a lot more, and may cause more harm than good.
My main rig, had to edit post, Speccy link not taken:
Quad Core i7-4790K (Devil's Canyon) 4th gen 1150 LGA CPU
ASUS Z97 Pro Gamer MB (Socket 1150) with TOSLINK Digital Audio Output (Realtek HD Audio)
8GB x4 (32GB Total) GSkill TridentX F3-2400C10D-16GTX (two 16GB kits) running in XMP #1 Mode (1.65V) 10-12-12-31
EVGA 1070 FTW + ACX 3.0 GPU (8GB GDDR5)
512GB Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD (Primary & OS drive)
2TB WD Gold Datacenter HDD (WD2005FBYZ), 128MB cache, 7200 rpm (Data drive, Enterprise models my preference)
ASUS DRW-24F1ST c Optical drive (No ASUS Logo, lowest priced component of build)
Fractal Design Define R5 case (black, no window)
Noctua NH-515 cooler (massive, twin tower cooler with two 140mm fans)
EVGA SuperNova G2 650W Gold Full Modular PSU (my 'go to' brand for PSU's also)
Samsung 28" U28E510D 4K UHD Monitor (1 DP 1.2 & 1 HDMI 2.0 ports @ 60Hz, 1 HDMI 1.4 @ 30Hz)
VIZIO 29" Sound Bar (SB2920x-C6)
Still to Come:
Internal TV Tuner, To Be Decided (no USB Junk
)
Amazon Fire Box (to be connected to the above)
Beyerdynamic DT-990-Pro-250-Professional Acoustically Open Headphones 250 Ohms
Cat
post edited by cat1092 - 2017/06/10 15:35:44