ASUS GeForce GTX 960 STRIX - The New Sweet Spot for Gamers?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,542 words · ~7 min read
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another day another graphics card Welcome to our review of the GeForce GTX
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960 stricks from ASUS NVIDIA's latest
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attempt to hit The Sweet Spot $200 price point with a card that delivers a great
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gaming experience but have they taken
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things to the next level like they did when they launched the 8800 GT at $200
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or is the gtx960 an uninspiring
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architectural refresh that will Delight Gamers about as much as their favorite
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cereal now with 20% more brand for a healthy colon something that's certainly
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a good thing but just not that
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exciting cooler Masters case mod World Series is your opportunity to show off
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your modding skills and win great prizes entries close February 7th 2015 click
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now to learn more so we will have a video coming up that examines the 960s
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competitiveness when you run a couple of them in SL but today's focus is on a single card
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config and the card we'll be using is Aus strix design one that we already
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liked from the GTX 970 and 980
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iterations and we continue to like here why do we like it you might ask well for
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a number of reasons which I would normally explain in the context of how
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it compares to a reference design but gtx960 reference designs don't really
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exist out in the Wilds all I can really say about it is that the card itself
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features aa's usual solid build quality with special attention to
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overclockability Wine reduction and lifespan improvements and the cooler is
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a beefy quad heat pipe aluminum finair with two 75 mm fans and this is our
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favorite thing about stricks cards by the way that only need to spin when the
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card is under heavy load at idle it's silent and even under light loads like
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League of Legends at 1080p the fans do not need to spin now it should be noted
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that with recent updates to third party overclocking tools like After Burner you
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can do this manually now with AUST some fan curve but I still think it's nice
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for the other 95% of people out there that stricks cards do it out of the box
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now for the tour of the rest of the card as expected it features a PCIe 16x gen 3
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slot at the bottom a six pin PCIe power connector at the back with a handy dandy
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indicator led to show you you've plugged it in correctly an SLI connector at the
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top this card supports up to two-way SLI and on the rear the standard Maxwell IO
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config with a dual link dvii connector three native DisplayPort 1.3 connector
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an HDMI 2.0 connector that can handle up to 4K 60 HZ on compatible displays and
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support via the underlying video engine for up to 5K displays or up to quad 4K
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multistream displays booya not that you
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can expect this card to run the most demanding AAA titles at 4K 60fps anyway
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that's kind of unreasonable but let's take a peek under the hood to get a
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better idea of what we can expect from the GTX 960 it features the same Maxwell
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architecture as the GTX x 750 Ti and GTX
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970 that are below and above it in the product stack so that means support for
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dynamic super resolution easy super sample anti-aliasing that can be turned
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on in GeForce experience to get the most out of older games mfaa NVIDIA's
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equivalent to standard multi- sample anti-aliasing with a smaller performance
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hit that is now compatible almost across the board with DirectX 10 and 11 titles
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something we did use for our testing on the basis of PC per excellent
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investigation into mfa's visual similarity to msaa vxgi a lighting
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feature that I suspect this card isn't powerful enough to ever actually use in
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a game anyway some memory bandwidth efficiency improvements thanks to
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NVIDIA's thirdd generation Delta color compression and finally enormous
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improvements in power consumption that NVIDIA figures gives the 960 about two
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times the efficiency of a GTX 660 which
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might seem like a strange comparison on the surface I mean why was NVIDIA so
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quick to compare 960 not to the card whose price and position it's directly
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replacing on store shelves the GTX 760
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but rather to the GTX 660 in their press deck well because marketing names aside
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it's actually a much more direct successor to that card because it
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features a fully fledged GM 206 Maxwell
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core at its heart compared to the fully fledged GK 106 Kepler in the 660 the 760
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was actually a bit of an odd duck card in that it actually had a gk104 4-based
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GPU same as the GTX 670 680 and 770 but
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with some additional kneecapping so that explains the step down in memory
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interface width from 256bit to 128bit
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something I'm sure NVIDIA hopes to compensate for with higher clocks and
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their more efficient memory architecture but enough of that stuff how does it
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actually perform well it's fine I guess um as usual we're using our 5960x
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overclock test bench with all cards overclocked to the max check the
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spreadsheet the video description for the overclocks we achieved we ran some
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Modern AAA titles at 1080P and some more
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casual games at both 1080P and 4K to see how it Stacks up and well it performs
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better than the GTX 760 while costing less both for the end user and for
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NVIDIA and delivers much better power consumption numbers than its competition
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on the red side although power consumption is not quite as important to
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me as you know kind of killer features and actually one of the killer features
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that NVIDIA has lorded over AMD for the last year variable refresh rate gaming
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with g-sync monitors is no longer an NVIDIA only thing thanks to freesync
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monitor availability being right on our doorstep right now although NVIDIA still
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has game stream and I still do use my shield a lot so conclusion time who is
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this card for built-in h265 encoding and
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decoding silence and power efficiency with HDMI 2.0 output for 4K 60 HZ
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displays and HDMI 2.0 TV and one makes
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it sound like a great Media Center PC card and its solid gaming performance
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lands it exactly in line with what you'd expect to get for 200 bucks and change
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does it light the world on fire uh it's a great overclocker with our GPU
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reaching about a 100 MHz above the Box's advertised boost clock without us even
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tweaking anything and then beyond that with some slider tuning but beyond that
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no not really but then if we were expecting it to then the fault is ours
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for not paying attention to NVIDIA's strategy over the last few years Andor
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the Ever Changing 20 nanom and 16 nanom manufacturing process road maps from
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Chip foundaries like Global foundaries and tsmc NVIDIA was unlikely to give us
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a crippled x04 class chip at this price
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point like they did with the 700 series given how well those are selling at $350
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to $550 so they went back to a fully enabled x06 in this case GM 206 which
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still manages to be very competitive
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speaking of managing to be competitive can you imagine a world where your
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