another day another graphics card Welcome to our review of the GeForce GTX
960 stricks from ASUS NVIDIA's latest
attempt to hit The Sweet Spot $200 price point with a card that delivers a great
gaming experience but have they taken
things to the next level like they did when they launched the 8800 GT at $200
or is the gtx960 an uninspiring
architectural refresh that will Delight Gamers about as much as their favorite
cereal now with 20% more brand for a healthy colon something that's certainly
a good thing but just not that
exciting cooler Masters case mod World Series is your opportunity to show off
your modding skills and win great prizes entries close February 7th 2015 click
now to learn more so we will have a video coming up that examines the 960s
competitiveness when you run a couple of them in SL but today's focus is on a single card
config and the card we'll be using is Aus strix design one that we already
liked from the GTX 970 and 980
iterations and we continue to like here why do we like it you might ask well for
a number of reasons which I would normally explain in the context of how
it compares to a reference design but gtx960 reference designs don't really
exist out in the Wilds all I can really say about it is that the card itself
features aa's usual solid build quality with special attention to
overclockability Wine reduction and lifespan improvements and the cooler is
a beefy quad heat pipe aluminum finair with two 75 mm fans and this is our
favorite thing about stricks cards by the way that only need to spin when the
card is under heavy load at idle it's silent and even under light loads like
League of Legends at 1080p the fans do not need to spin now it should be noted
that with recent updates to third party overclocking tools like After Burner you
can do this manually now with AUST some fan curve but I still think it's nice
for the other 95% of people out there that stricks cards do it out of the box
now for the tour of the rest of the card as expected it features a PCIe 16x gen 3
slot at the bottom a six pin PCIe power connector at the back with a handy dandy
indicator led to show you you've plugged it in correctly an SLI connector at the
top this card supports up to two-way SLI and on the rear the standard Maxwell IO
config with a dual link dvii connector three native DisplayPort 1.3 connector
an HDMI 2.0 connector that can handle up to 4K 60 HZ on compatible displays and
support via the underlying video engine for up to 5K displays or up to quad 4K
multistream displays booya not that you
can expect this card to run the most demanding AAA titles at 4K 60fps anyway
that's kind of unreasonable but let's take a peek under the hood to get a
better idea of what we can expect from the GTX 960 it features the same Maxwell
architecture as the GTX x 750 Ti and GTX
970 that are below and above it in the product stack so that means support for
dynamic super resolution easy super sample anti-aliasing that can be turned
on in GeForce experience to get the most out of older games mfaa NVIDIA's
equivalent to standard multi- sample anti-aliasing with a smaller performance
hit that is now compatible almost across the board with DirectX 10 and 11 titles
something we did use for our testing on the basis of PC per excellent
investigation into mfa's visual similarity to msaa vxgi a lighting
feature that I suspect this card isn't powerful enough to ever actually use in
a game anyway some memory bandwidth efficiency improvements thanks to
NVIDIA's thirdd generation Delta color compression and finally enormous
improvements in power consumption that NVIDIA figures gives the 960 about two
times the efficiency of a GTX 660 which
might seem like a strange comparison on the surface I mean why was NVIDIA so
quick to compare 960 not to the card whose price and position it's directly
replacing on store shelves the GTX 760
but rather to the GTX 660 in their press deck well because marketing names aside
it's actually a much more direct successor to that card because it
features a fully fledged GM 206 Maxwell
core at its heart compared to the fully fledged GK 106 Kepler in the 660 the 760
was actually a bit of an odd duck card in that it actually had a gk104 4-based
GPU same as the GTX 670 680 and 770 but
with some additional kneecapping so that explains the step down in memory
interface width from 256bit to 128bit
something I'm sure NVIDIA hopes to compensate for with higher clocks and
their more efficient memory architecture but enough of that stuff how does it
actually perform well it's fine I guess um as usual we're using our 5960x
overclock test bench with all cards overclocked to the max check the
spreadsheet the video description for the overclocks we achieved we ran some
Modern AAA titles at 1080P and some more
casual games at both 1080P and 4K to see how it Stacks up and well it performs
better than the GTX 760 while costing less both for the end user and for
NVIDIA and delivers much better power consumption numbers than its competition
on the red side although power consumption is not quite as important to
me as you know kind of killer features and actually one of the killer features
that NVIDIA has lorded over AMD for the last year variable refresh rate gaming
with g-sync monitors is no longer an NVIDIA only thing thanks to freesync
monitor availability being right on our doorstep right now although NVIDIA still
has game stream and I still do use my shield a lot so conclusion time who is
this card for built-in h265 encoding and
decoding silence and power efficiency with HDMI 2.0 output for 4K 60 HZ
displays and HDMI 2.0 TV and one makes
it sound like a great Media Center PC card and its solid gaming performance
lands it exactly in line with what you'd expect to get for 200 bucks and change
does it light the world on fire uh it's a great overclocker with our GPU
reaching about a 100 MHz above the Box's advertised boost clock without us even
tweaking anything and then beyond that with some slider tuning but beyond that
no not really but then if we were expecting it to then the fault is ours
for not paying attention to NVIDIA's strategy over the last few years Andor
the Ever Changing 20 nanom and 16 nanom manufacturing process road maps from
Chip foundaries like Global foundaries and tsmc NVIDIA was unlikely to give us
a crippled x04 class chip at this price
point like they did with the 700 series given how well those are selling at $350
to $550 so they went back to a fully enabled x06 in this case GM 206 which
still manages to be very competitive
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