Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed now do you still have a GeForce GTX 960 graphics card and have you been holding out for a worthwhile upgrade for something that costs around the same $200 you spent all those years ago well if so then this video will be of interest which is probably why you clicked on it hmm anyway why am i comparing this now four year old graphics card with much newer graphics cards such as the GTX 1660 I've got the MSI gaming X model here I also have the game II X and gaming Z versions of the 60 and 60 TI + RT X 2060 and we've got about 10 other graphics cards as well but why am i comparing this old banger to these new graphics cards and the reason is it's well it's a throwback video and we haven't well we've never actually done a throwback video for the GTX 960 so it's not a although this is the 2019 version there wasn't a 2018 a 2017 or 2016 version of this four year old graphics card so for some reason it's just flowing under the radar and we haven't really given it a dedicated video so that's all going to change now part of the reason why I've decided to focus on the GTX 960 is because of some claims made by Nvidia in the review guide they said that the new GT x16 60 was a whopping 113 percent faster than the GTX 960 and that makes it the perfect upgrade option for those with this mid-range Maxwell GPU still in their rig spitting out whatever frames it can in modern games and since the GTX 960 is the fifth most popular GPU amongst Steam users seems there are still plenty of you still using it before we get to the benchmarks though here are just a few quick stats about the geforce gtx 960 it packs just 1,024 cuda cores that's 27 percent less than the 1660 and they're clocked 34% lower there's also 33% fewer ops and while both make use of gddr5 memory the 960 has 42% less memory bandwidth due to the fact that in part users lower clocked memory but more crucially a narrower 120 bit wide memory bus okay enough about stats let's talk about the testing for this one I'll be looking closely at performance at 1080p and a dozen titles and then we'll jump to the typical 33 game breakdown comparing the 1660 and 960 head-to-head and finally a few quick notes on the test system here we've used the corer 919 or okay clocked at 5 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3,200 memory as for the drivers we used adrenalin 2019 Edition nineteen point two point three for the Radeon GPUs and game ready for 1935 WH GL for the GeForce GPUs ok let's get into the results playing apex legends it's handy P with the higher quality preset isn't that much fun with the GTX 960 you're looking at frame rates that are consistently well below 60 fps so far from ideal when playing a fast-paced first-person shooter for those of you not wanting to reduce the visual quality settings we'll have to upgrade and something like the new gtx 1660 offers a healthy 136 percent performance boost with 106 FPS on average moving on to the recently released the division 2 and we find a pretty dire situation with the gtx 960 just 27 FPS on average basically the games unplayable using the ultra quality preset at le p and middle e though the game is quite demanding with these high quality settings so those of you looking to upgrade to at gtx 1660 can look forward to a pretty mega 152 percent performance boost not too bad that though I should note if you're only looking at playing the division 2 then something like an Rx 590 might be a better choice and I believe right now you do get a free copy of the division 2 with radeon GPU purchases or maybe that's just the rise in cpus don't you'll have to look into that one moving on we find a similar situation when testing with shadow of the Tomb Raider using the highest quality preset the old GeForce GPU sped out just 34 FPS on average and with frame dips into the 20s it was pretty horrible under these conditions I think it's fair to say meanwhile the 124 percent performance bump offered by the GTX 1660 metagame could now be enjoyed in all of its glory at 1080p has to be said the GTX 960 does a decent job in Forza horizon 4 though this decent performance can be mostly attributed to how well optimised Forza horizon 4 is still you will have to use the 4 gigabyte model if you want to see the kind of performance that we're showing here and even then the GTX 1660 still offered a 126 percent performance boost hitting 95 FPS on average and with over twice as many frames pumped out each second it did offer a significantly smoother gaming experience hitman 2 was also playable with the geforce gtx 960 you know really wouldn't take too much to dial back the quality things to achieve that glorious 60fps that said if you want to enjoy hitman with the ultra quality settings enabled then something like a gtx 1660 is the way to go as spat out a much more impressive 93 FPS on average testing with just'cause force or the new budget cheering GPU delivered just over twice as many frames when compared to the gtx 960 the jump up from 32 FPS to 65 FPS really is very massive and it makes leaping and flying around while you attack enemies much easier and perhaps more importantly much more enjoyable think it's fair to say we're starting to see a pretty consistent trend here testing with Resident Evil 2 saw the gtx 1660 providing 129 percent more performance at iupi with the maximum quality preset enabled this more than doubling of the frame rate obviously led to significant improvements in gameplay and while this isn't a game that necessarily needs big frame rates the smoother motion certainly adds to the experience of all the games we've benchmarked so far fortnight is by far the least demanding as such the GTX 960 was good for 52 FPS on average and we are also using the epic quality preset which is the highest quality preset available in the game so with competitive settings which most fort-like players like to use the 960 would be pushing over 60 FPS at 1080p however if you want a 144 FPS or perhaps even more FPS with competitive settings the GTX 1660 will be required and even with the epic preset enabled it's still averaged 113 fps Metro Exodus is a new and very demanding title the gtx 1660 for example cut quite average 60fps attorney p with the ultra quality preset enabled that said it is a darn sight better than the 27 FPS on average you'd be getting with the aging gtx 960 so there is that I must admit I expected the gtx 960 to do quite well in Rainbow six siege and while 48 FPS on average is playable I was actually expecting it to be a little better than that though come to think of it I'm not exactly sure why given the rx 570 does only render 69 FPS on average in our test this means the upgrade to the gtx 1660 would net you a healthy 146 percent performance bump hitting 118 FPS on average now this is an interesting result as it's one of these smallest margins that we found for the 1660 over the 960 across the 33 games test and here the churring GPU was just 81% faster yes just 81 percent faster obviously that's still a really big margin but given we've typically seen more than double the performance out of the 1660 this one is a bit of a surprise especially given that battlefield 5 is a very modern very demanding first-person shooter anyway 81 percent it is although World of Tanks has recently received a major overhaul we are testing with the HD client it's still very well optimised for all the hardware for example the GTX 960 was still good for 55 FPS on average and that's very playable performance for this title still if you seek more performance than the GTX 1660 can help you out with a nice 91% performance bump the last game we're going to look closely at is Far Cry new dawn and here the GTX 960 also had enough grunt for playable performance at 1080p using the ultra quality preset so that's pretty impressive and it really speaks to how well optimised this title is still if you want to keep frame rates well above 60fps at all times then the 98 percent performance boost you'll get from the GTX 1660 will be very well now when it comes to power consumption we see just how impressively churring based GTX 1660 really is in terms of efficiency despite often offering twice as much performance as the GTX 960 it pushed total system consumption usage just 16% higher hitting 262 watts still it has to be said even by today's standards the GTX 960 it isn't terrible and you'll get away with a very modest power supply okay so we've seen how the gtx 960 performs in modern titles at terapy using dial-up quality settings and it's not great but it's also what you'd expect from a four-year old budget mid-range graphics card I don't know if you'd call it low end or mid range let's just go the budget mid range seems to sort of cover us on both fronts there anyway the gtx 960 it went on sale way back in 2015 for $200 u.s. so that was the MSRP for that particular model though that was for the two gigabyte version the four gigabyte version that I tested that was around I think forty to fifty dollars more it's hard to say exactly cuz I don't recall the exact prices back then but from memory it was about forty to fifty dollars more and back then that kind of price premium certainly wasn't worth it today though the two gigabyte model will lag behind quite a bit and chances are you probably have the two gigabyte model I don't think there was that many 4 gigabyte cards salt they really only made sense quite late in the game when it probably didn't make sense to buy a GTX 960 but anyway if you do have a true gigabyte model then the performance uplift will be even greater so it makes even more sense to upgrade to something like the gtx 1660 as you might have expected based on the 13 games that we just looked at closely the gtx 1660 is for the most part more than twice as fast as the gtx 960 on average at 1080p we're looking at a 117 percent performance boost so that's obviously pretty massive and it means in video a right on the money when they claimed a 113 percent performance boost that amounts to an almost 30 percent performance uplift per year so it is hard to argue that's not a good deal granted the gtx 1660 does cost 22 thirty dollars more than what the 960 cost upon release or at the MSRP and that 10 to 15% price increase isn't ideal I suppose but it's not exactly unreasonable either given that the Radeon rx 588 gigabyte cost $190 us right now placing it roughly on par with the GTX 1660 in terms of cost per frame this does mean the GTX 960 owners have had a similar value option in the RX 580 for quite some time now and I guess that does make the GTX 1660 a little less exciting though to be fair the 1660 is a faster product on the RX 5a so it is still quite exciting om because no one will mention this in the comment section below the radio rx 580 comes with two free games apparently I am contractually obligated to mention the free games bundle every time I discuss a radio and GP you must be somewhere in the fine print anyway that is going to do it for this one there's quite clearly a number of very solid upgrade options for those of you still using a rusty old gtx 960 so if you want something like the 1660 1660 TI or maybe even a radeon RX v 8 if you can grab one of them on sale then yeah plenty of options there that will offer you quite a lot more performance I hope you guys enjoyed the benchmarks and remember you can jump over to our patreon page for all 33 graphs if you want to take a closer look at any of the games that we did or didn't discuss in this video thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you again next time you