Gadgetory

yesterday's video which you can watch here covered the ins and outs of the specs of the geforce gtx 960 and how it stacks up in the landscape of other single GPU graphics card configurations for gamers today's video is two things it's a look at the overclocking results in performance of gigabytes g1 gaming edition 960 a higher price but perhaps higher performance alternative to Asus Strix 960 and second it's an investigation of the sensibility of running 960s in SLI versus buying a single 970 on the subject of sensibility do quick charging phone wall adapters make sense that's an upcoming video but for now this one cooler masters case mod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries closed february 7 to 2015 click now to learn more so we'll start with a brief rundown of the gtx 960 with a particular emphasis on gigabytes implementation g1 gaming is their top tier of card and aside from being over built with a 6 phase power design and dual 6 pin PCI e connectors it features a chip that's gone through what gigabyte calls the GPU gauntlet sorting to guarantee higher overclocking capabilities and given that we got ours running stable at fifteen sixty five megahertz throughout our test suite we either got lucky or what they're doing is working the cooler plays a role here as well though with the wind force 3 X's quad 6 millimeter heat pipe triple fan design doing a great job of staying quiet and keeping our chip cool under load at a maximum of 67 degrees Celsius even with the card overclocked to the max the way that we do for our GPU testing and it managed to stay completely silent at idle and under light loads with a neato LED indicator next to the illuminated windforce logo that tells you if the fans are off and the card is running in silent mode something that more and more cards are able to do these days but hey it's a feature that's on here thought I better mention it I'm not sure why though that we need the LED indicator because I could just look at the fans if I wanted to know if they are stopped but whatever gigabyte onto the rest of the car it's got a PCIe gen3 16x slot on the bottom a single SLI connector on the top for supportive up to 2-way SLI it's got the same technologies as other gtx 960 so that's h.265 encoding and decoding dynamic super resolution mfa anti-aliasing which we used for our testing thanks to its similar appearance and smaller performance hit compared to msaa and great power efficiency with this card drawing only 250 watts total from the wall for the entire system when overclocked under loading Crysis 3 but it also has one other special text something that gigabyte calls flex display technology which is basically an onboard active DisplayPort to DVI adapter that affords users a little bit more flexibility especially those using an older DVI based display just pay attention to the coating on the back of the i/o shield for which ones you can plug in at the same time now aside from the stuff that I covered so far and different stock and boost clock speeds at their hearts all gtx 960 s are essentially the same with two gigs of DDR 5 memory on a 128-bit bus a fully enabled Maxwell architecture GM 206 processing core with all the CUDA cores and SM X's that go along with that and a price in the 200 to 230 dollar range so you might be questioning the point of doing a review of one 960 yesterday and another one today which is why we spent a little bit of extra time and not only through our win force 960 at its max overclock the full OC spreadsheet by the way is linked in the video description below on to our standard 59 60 X test bench but we also rented an SLI with our Strix card to see how to two hundred ish dollar cards stack up to a single one of their three hundred and fifty dollar ish Big Brother the GTX 970 so our single card testing didn't reveal any great you know revelations it turns out that when you clock one gtx 960 slightly faster than another one it performs ever so slightly better whether this and all the pros and cons of one card versus another is worth another $15 or not to you is entirely your deal but our sli 960 versus 970 at 4k results were ever so slightly more interesting in spite of the 960s much lower memory bandwidth and half sized frame buffer remember to two gig cards is two gig effective vram in sli it scaled well in sli considering the price of the solution compared to a single 970 except in WoW where it didn't at all so I think that pretty much wraps it up for the gigabyte g1 gaming GTX 960 and also our gtx 960 coverage in general we used to do a lot more videos about the different variants of a particular graphics core but unless something really exciting and unexpected happens this will likely be our last word on this one if you're looking for a quiet and efficient single GPU solution it's a great choice if heat power consumption and noise are not issues for you the r9 290 for as little as forty dollars more compared to a card like this stomp sit and if you're looking to pair up two graphics cards then I would personally go with a single GTX 970 over to 960 s4 the 4 gig frame buffer and the more consistent performance across a variety of games that comes with using a single GPU speaking of affordable and consistent today sponsored ting calm ting uses the Sprint network so anywhere with good Sprint service will have good ting service but it's their billing strategy that sets them apart from other wireless carriers instead of locking you into some arbitrary well two hundred and fifty of minutes of this and five hundred megabytes of that ting lets you use and pay for exactly what you need and what's cool is that if you're not sure whether this strategy will actually work out better for you visit Linus ENCOM to enter your last few bills and it'll spit out how much you would have paid by switching to ting so head over there today and give it a whirl if you like what you see you can even get a partial credit towards making the switch Boop anyway guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if you're feeling it's more complicated in this as always linked in the video description we have a place to buy t-shirts like this one give us a monthly contribution or change your amazon bookmark come on start billion code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy graphics cards or whatever else it is you buy on Amazon that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe