Gadgetory

hang on to your butt's everybody it's that time of year again because NVIDIA has just launched their brand-new sweet spot GPU the GTX 960 and being the GPU whore that I am you had to know this video is coming with its improved radiator support and legendary noise optimization the new define r54 fractal design is a PC builders dream come true click the link in the description to learn more now I'm going to go ahead and start this video out with an apology that's because there's about to be a few gtx970 reviews on this channel over the next week or two now this is the first time in the history of my channel that we are going to be taking a look at more than one of the new cards at the time of launch covering several brand new offerings from what is sure to be a very popular card but now that we've got that out of the way let's go ahead and get started now first up in this gauntlet of GP reviews is gigabytes g1 gaming the 960 g1 gaming actually my bad that's the 970 this is the g1 gaming 960 yeah as you may have noticed by now they have the exact same cooler as their bigger brothers the 970 and the 980 now gigabyte has been taking a lot of time and giving special attention in detail to their mid-range cards the same attention to detail as they give their flagship cards like the 979 80 but at a much lower price point now features the same triple fan cooler with the metal shroud glowing LED fans with its four six millimeter copper heat pipes able to dissipate up to 300 watts of a heat now they also mention that it has a backplate and still one of the sexiest back plates on the market I might add and one of the major benefits of Maxwell base GPUs is their incredible power to performance ratio making the core arguably the most power efficient and cool GPU chip coolest GPU chips that ended it has ever produced because of this advancement in technology companies have been really promoting fanless performance in many lower demanding games allowing for completely silent operation and the 960 is absolutely no exception now on the g1 game cooller the fans will not even start to spend until the GPU reaches 62 degrees Celsius or the GPU reaches 60 watts of draw okay enough about the cooler we know about the cooler the coolers not new just tell us about the specs of the 960 I hear you all right well the gtx 960 g1 gaming has 1,024 cuda cores running at 1,300 4 megahertz which is a bump over the reference clock of 1178 128-bit memory bus with 7000 10 megahertz gddr5 effective memory speed and a 6 phase power delivery system with dual 6 pin PCI e connectors which is again a bump over the reference three-phase power design and single 6 pin power requirement I can already hear some grumbling 128-bit memory bus whoa and trust me I thought the same exact thing when I had my meeting with Nvidia why the 128 bit but apparently with their revamped memory subsystem the GPU can more effectively or more efficiently utilize the memory bandwidth for an effective 9.3 gigabits per second via that 120 bit bus now lastly the 960 features some amazing options with 3 DisplayPort 1.2 dvi-i a DVID and an HDMI 2.0 port for 4k at 60 Hertz perfect for the home theater PC and that pretty much covers it for the overview last thing I want to mention though is that gigabyte highly highly touts their GPU gauntlet sorting basically it's a GPU bidding process that guarantees higher overclocks and an excellent thermal efficiency yeah a company that actually guarantees higher overclocks over their non g1 gaming line of GPUs and you know there is only one way that we can test that claim we're going to play some games we're going to blossom up well I'll get you to the choppa alright sorry about that transition now before we talk about the numbers let's first talk about where the card is placed in the market and the proper expectation first this is a sweet spot card well what the hell is a sweet spot card valve did a hardware poll on the data collected from all of their users and they found that the number one and two most used cards where the 60 series GPUs like the six sixty seven sixty and they also found that the six sixty is the most commonly used card amongst MOBA games likely League of Legends dota 2 heroes of newerth I'm two out of three users of that genre we're using a six sixty or older now personally I feel that this card is also aimed right at the 1080p gamer especially those playing triple-a titles like Far Cry battlefield for upcoming games like evolve GTA 5 and this is why I only tested the card at 1080p in the benchmark testing it any higher any higher resolutions would have been testing the card outside of the performance target of the GPU now one other thing to mention is I test all of my cards overclocked now I this is my stance on this it's free performance and everyone should be overclocking especially on cards like the g1 it's built for overclocking now gigabyte advertised a boost clock of 1304 but I noticed that I actually boosted all the way up to 1392 without even touching MSI Afterburner now this got me excited obviously because it meant that the power target and the thermals were obviously in check so I wanted to know how much we could really squeeze out of this card well I'm happy to report that the card managed an impressive 1527 megahertz stable and I guess it's not really all that impressive though or surprising since the 970 and the 980 often are capable of fifteen megahertz and Beyond or fifteen hundred megahertz while 50 megahertz now this is a thing another thing overclocked to 1527 megahertz and the memory overclocked to 7600 and I ran my usual gauntlet of testing synthetic benchmarks some older titles some newer titles and I'm very pleased with the price to performance ratio especially the average in fps as every game was at least 60fps and temps never exceeded 59 degrees Celsius in my open air testbench i expect that the case with proper air cooling would see similar results now i actually ran the fan on a pretty standard profile i don't like to I don't like that whole leave the fans off thing so I just let them run at about thirty percent and actually went up to thirty seven percent to maintain that temperature in the 59 degrees Celsius range in fact we are running right now though fully overclocked here with the fans running their basic profile on Haven benchmark and we are seeing 66 degrees Celsius so that's still very very impressive while overclocked now the g1 gaming at the time of filming this video is sitting right at two hundred and twenty nine dollars and if there is any takeaway from this video let it be this pay attention with mid-range cards like the 960 offering all of the same features as the big brother like DSR MFA a supporting more time more and more titles amazing overclocking low temperature low power requirements and DirectX 12 support competition between team green and team red and 2015 is going to be good so there you go guys the GTX 960 g1 gaming from gigabyte is definitely worth taking a look at if you're shopping for a new graphics card a gigabyte actually launched three new net 960 cards including a small form-factor ITX sized card which is a trend we have been seeing a lot more of and like I mentioned I will be taking a look at several brands of this card in the very near future so I hope you guys have 960 fever anyway guys thanks for watching thanks for supporting and I will see you in the next video hopefully hopefully you guys come back that'd be good