Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the network in case you're feeling ill from all the gtx 960 videos on the web right now it's about to get downright terminal cuz today i'll be talking about the newest mid tier video card from team green that's been targeted at 1080 gaming and while a vast majority of gamers who end up buying this card will indeed be gaming on a single 1080 display NVIDIA has integrated into the GTX 960 full support for two-way SLI this means the 960 when paired with well itself is potentially a viable option for gaming at resolutions higher than 1080 but does that necessarily make it the best option for about 50 bucks less than what you'd spend on two gtx 960 s the GTX 970 is a powerful card with twice the vram as a single gtx 960 with its two gig frame buffer and as we all know all that precious via ram is especially useful when gaming at higher resolutions but remember kids video memory doesn't magically combine itself in multi-gpu setups so having to 960s an sli will still only yield two gigabytes of vram per card which is not the same as four gigabytes of vram for a single GPU as is the case with the 970 now with that being said I'm about to show you guys some performance benchmarks between these two configurations at both 1080 and 1440 to find out which gaming solution makes more sense and as an added bonus I'll be showing off stock and overclock results of both the gtx 960 and sli as well as the gtx 970 with a bass boost clock of 1178 and 1316 megahertz I was able to take my 960 s to 14 71 megahertz without ever touching the voltage as for the GTX 970 which has a base clock of 1050 and a boost of 1178 I pushed it all the way to 1542 megahertz while maintaining rock-solid stability now quickly going over my testing hardware I've got an 8 core 59 60 X clocked 240 300 megahertz and x99 gigabyte motherboard and 16 gigs of DDR for GCL memory at 2666 as far as the cards themselves go I've got a GTX 960 from ZOTAC which is the card I used for my single card benchmarks as well as the primary GPU for my sli testing you can also expect a full review of this card coming soon the other gtx 960 i had on hand was the gaming 2g from msi whose factory overclock speeds were cut down to match the reference speeds of the zotac card when doubling down yes I SL I'd these two cards together and no I'm not particularly fond of interracial hardware porn and finally the EVGA GTX 970 for the win edition was also under clocked and overclocked accordingly to achieve those stock and OC results you're about to see starting off with Metro last night I was having trouble getting SLI to work with both these synthetic benchmark utility and the game itself but at the very least here we can see the 1440 results showing a much wider lead for the GTX 970 than a 1080 a perfect example of the extra frame buffer at work battlefield 4 is where I introduced the GTX 960 s and sli and here we see them beating out the single 970 at both resolutions but this time at 1440 the cards are really neck and neck when overclocked despite the 960 s great scalability similar scores across the board for BioShock Infinite with the gtx 960 duo beating out the 970 once again though all the leads at 1440 so far have been pretty marginal and whether or not the average user would even be able to notice a difference in gameplay between these two setups is in my opinion debatable certainly the strengths of both of these cards was tested with Crysis 3 and while the overclocked gtx 960 saw an average FPS 6 frames higher than the 970 minimum frame rate still barely topped 30fps and was actually a bit lower than what the 970 was able to achieve and finally our results in hitman absolution show the GTX 970 ever so slightly trailing behind the 960 s at 1440 but absolutely crushing them when it comes to minimum frame rates it's quite possible that the GTX 970 s 4 gigs of memory is doing a better job at processing all those various filters that were enabled in this test so yes the GTX 960 s in sli beat out - the single 970 in all 5 of the tests that I ran but considering the negligible performance gains at 1440 I personally don't think that the added heat power consumption and $50 or more premium of these two cards is worth the few extra frames you'll squeeze out of your games at resolutions above 1080p couldn't handle that the sli setup could now it might be a different story if you've had the gtx 960 in your system for a while and are looking for a nice $200 upgrade but this is a brand new card so that would technically be impossible so should you pick up two 960s over a single 97 impossibly it's also worth mentioning that if you're not bothered by power consumption or the color red the r9 285 and the r9 290 offer exceptional bang for the buck just hope that bang isn't the sound of your system exploding but of course in the world of PC DIY nothing is really set in stone and this has merely been my two cents J don't sue me as always tossed me a like on this video before you guys go and let me know in the comments what your take is on the gtx 960 also