Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we are talking about SLI GTX 960 s I tested two of asus strix gtx 960 cards in sli to see if the performance gain was actually noticeable and if it is is the value good when compared against Nvidia's other offerings the GTX 970 or 980 or AMD's r9 290x and similar cards so a few things out of the way we are using the asus strix gtx 960 which is the very same card that we reviewed in our gtx 960 review but we've got two of them as a quick recap the Strix has a bolstered core clock and boost clock it's got a bit faster memory clocked by 190 megahertz and all the stats are published in the article linked in the description below if you are curious about the specifications so it is a bit faster than the reference gtx 960 it's also quieter and it spins down the fans when less than 30 watt load is is placed on the card so if you're playing League of Legends or dota it will spin down the fan so that is the card we are using this video card is 210 dollars so if you buy two of them that puts you at just over $420 and then you've got other options nearby like the GTX 970 which has 4 gigabytes of video RAM a bit larger than this frame buffer probably set around 350 so it's cheaper got a larger frame buffer and a wider bus and then you've got obviously the GTX 980 if you were to spend about $100 more than the SLI configuration significantly more powerful you're buying an AMD there's a 292 90 X price range of about 300 to 400 dollars these days and then things like the 285 are nearby as well so those are the configurations we're looking at when it comes to the value of SLI GTX 960 s and to sort of recap some of the concerns with SLI that we've had in the past years generally there is a lack of support in video games for SLI configurations that has been trending for the better in the last 2 years or so and this does include crossfire at this point when I say SLI I do mean both crossfire and SLI games have not supported multi-gpu configurations very well they're finally starting to do that and as Nvidia and Andy both push for this support we are seeing games increase their frame rates and actually playability with SLI configurations part of the incompatibility has triggered what's known as micro stuttering there's also tearing and framedrops and all sorts of issues that can stem from incompatibility with SLI or crossfire and those things mean that you have to disable one of your cards immediately cutting your investment down to half of the original investment so you're not even using one of your cards at this point which makes it very difficult to justify SLI so we're testing in this benchmark to see if that is still the case with modern games and triple-a titles other than these concerns we have concerns on the Department of the GTX 960 s memory bandwidth and memory interface it is not quite as wide in terms of bit as its GTX 970 counterpart which is cheaper than two 960 s in SLI all cards were tested using the latest Nvidia drivers as of the posting of this video and the latest and the Omega catalyst driver as you can see the GTX 980 is king of the Metro last light bench with the 290x following shortly behind by AMD the 970 is a bit behind both of those but above the 960 SLI configuration so already we're seeing the 400 plus dollar SLI configuration falling short to a $350 single card option and then the 780 is behind that the 780 these days if you're not aware can be obtained for about $300 making a very high value but it under performs compared to even SLI 960 so we start to see the the cards age moving on to grid Autosports benchmark the GTX 960 s in SLI pushed about a hundred FPS which is within margin of error of the GTX 970 s performance so these are effectively identical and the 780 and 980 both have performed these cards some of these discrepancies will be due to the games software side optimization and what the developers have worked with when optimizing the game so do keep that in mind but even still the 960 s in SLI are not great value when compared to even end videos other offerings and the value is still sort of questionable when compared to a and is 290 X or 290 offerings moving to Far Cry 4 we can see the GTX 980 tears away from everyone else with the 960 is following behind an sli so here's an instance where we don't have the GTX 970 on the bench because it was not available unfortunately for our Far Cry 4 testing so we don't really have a great idea of where that falls it's somewhere between the 780 and 980 but even still the GTX 960 is in sli performed pretty well in Far Cry and begin to be more justifiable in this instance unfortunately this is the only instance thus far where they have been more easily justified so it's not that versatile of a configuration as you can see by this test now we did other tests using battlefield 4 where we saw substantial improvement between the single 960 and sli 960 s but still not great value we also tested with firestrike which is a 3d mark tool synthetic benchmark showing a massive lead for the GTX 980 against pretty much everything else and the SLI 960 s were very close to the 290x the only place were the GTX 960 s and sli really broke away from everyone else was in the 3d mark firestrike graphics and physics framerate testing these are independent tests of physics versus graphics rendering and the 960 s in sli in this instance outperformed even the 980 this is sort of where we see issues with synthetic testing and as soon as we did a combined test of both the physics and the graphics for the 960 s they fell short massively from everyone else so this is an issue stemming from the memory bandwidth and memory interface limits that are imposed on the GTX 960 it does it great with 1080p gaming that isn't very intensive from both the physics and graphics side simultaneously but as soon as you introduce both of those elements we see this shortcoming in the 960 finally I decided to do a higher resolution test than 1080 because I was curious to see if the memory bandwidth an interface would bottleneck the 960 to the point where it is not worth buying a second one in our high resolution tests almost every game was very playable the 28 96 by 1629 resolution and this remains true even at the 1% low dips where they stayed above 30fps so the dips were less noticeable the only break to this rule is far cry 4 which had a lot of frame drop issues in SLI at a higher resolution which is probably again pointing toward limitations of the bus the memory bus on this GPU now we also tested using an assassin's creed unity and there's no chart for this because there were no results for this Assassin's Creed unity is so poorly optimized for SLI and this is a really more of a fault of Ubisoft although Nvidia worked closely with them so it's it's on both parties ac you had severe stuttering issues the textures were flickering and tearing as we played the game turning black things like that there were massive frame drops and lags where we would have upwards of a second of frozen screen time in Assassin's Creed unity so that showcases the general concern with SLI and crossfire and that these concerns are still alive and well even with the extra push from all the GPU manufacturers and game companies to improve SLI and crossfire compatibility so the ultimate question is an SLI configuration with GTX 960 is worth it really the answer is no with one contingency the value is poor when compared against even Nvidia's other offerings and especially a.m. these offerings and nearby price points and this is largely due to memory interface limitations it's largely due to the fact that the 960 is meant to be a single card solution for 1080p gaming to begin with so it wasn't really built for SLI even though it is compatible with SLI but the one contingency is a very specific use case if you were to buy a single 960 today and you wanted to buy a second one in about a year to improve your performance then I could see it being justifiable at this point if you're looking to spend $400 you are much better off buying a single card solution from either AMD or Nvidia and if you're thinking well I'll buy a 960 today and then maybe in two or three years I'll buy a second one don't get your hopes up on that because every time we've ever looked into that option it stops existing because the cards cease production limiting you to use devices and very expensive devices because the demand is higher and the supply is almost non-existent so that makes it a wiser choice to buy a single card to replace your single 960 and a couple years than it does to do SLI and a couple years of that 960 so that is all for this review check the channel for more information on video cards graphics computer hardware we appreciate your subscriptions and support and I will see you all next time peace