Gadgetory

excellent so we are kicking it old-school with a video card review today so here is the brand new msi geforce gtx 960 gaming 4 gigabyte edition featuring in videos GM 206 maxwell base GPU and currently retailing for about 240 dollars that was a bit critical of the gtx 960 when it launched with only a 2 gig frame buffer although i did appreciate things like the power efficiency and I had no problem recommending it for PC gaming at 1080p so will the 4 gigs on this factory overclocked card from MSI make a difference especially while playing GTA 5 for PC which is now available it is also a huge vram hog well to answer that question I'm going to split this video in half now I'm not making it a two-parter but the first half is going to focus on the card itself from the specs and overview and whatnot and the second half will be some live benchmarking with GTA 5 so feel free to skip ahead if that's exactly what you're here for let's start with a closer look at msi geforce gtx 960 gaming 4g though my immediate thought was that this does not look like a sub $250 card you'll often see pared-down variations of the custom cooling solutions on these less expensive cards this one could easily pass for a gtx 970 or 980 for that matter the twin frozer 5 cooler is almost the same with 3 nickel-plated heat pipes one 8 millimeter and 2 6 millimeter as well as dual 100 millimeter fans these are Torx fans with 14 blades of varying shape and size they're both very effective and very quiet and I'm going to feel this piece of plastic out for the clip just like that now they don't spin up that's what that piece of plastic was on here for unless 3d rendering kicks in and it gets up to a certain temperature that's a trick that's very common on these 900 series cards it's still very nice to have the red and black aesthetic also works great overall there's a white LED backlit msi dragon logo which looks pretty sweet and what the freaking hell of act plates like oh my gosh nice black finish back plate with MSI's dragon logo on it very very clean something that you don't even get with MSI standard gaming Edition 970 and nine eighty so sweet cool very good job inside for including a backplate on this one the PCB is also a nice black finish and you even get these black metal pieces to kind of fit over the MOSFETs and the vram modules that helps cool them down and it also gives the PCB a little bit of extra support and rigidity for the card overall the only way I was able to actually tell at a glance that this is a GTX 960 apart from the slightly redesigned cooler is at the end towards the peg connector the PCB in here is pretty much empty which isn't a bad thing but it doesn't mean that this is a full-sized two slot card it measures 267 millimeters long or about 10.5 inches which isn't exactly short it should be fine in most cases and the extra size should improve the cooling performance as well moving on to connectors you will need an eight pin peg PCI Express graphics power connector versus a six pin that you would need on the reference board MSI is also recommending a 400 watt power supply for the graphics card and your entire system kudos to MSI by the way for flipping that peg connector so that the catch is on the top to by the way great job there is a PCI Express gen3 connector along the bottom of the card as well as a single SLI finger along the top of the card since this card does support two-way SLI video outs are all the same as the og gtx 960 970 or 980 in that you get a dual link DVI in hdmi 2.0 as well as three DisplayPort 1.2 full-sized connectors and again you can power for displays from this single card and video feature support is also pretty much the same as the 970 and the 980 so you can try out their new dynamic super resolution as well as g-sync shield support GPU boost physics cuda etc etc as for course effects the GM 206 GPU from Nvidia at the heart of this graphics card supports 1,024 cuda cores and msi factory overclocked sit to run at 1240 one megahertz base clock 1304 megahertz boost clock that's compared to the reference 960 boost which is 1178 rounding out the specs you get 32 ROP units and of course the 4 gigabytes of gddr5 memory running at 7,000 10 megahertz on a 128-bit bus now before we move on to the second half of this video with some GTA 5 benchmarking and gameplay demos let's pause for a moment to recognize my new sponsor that's right lynda.com I could tell you guys that lynda.com is an online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business technology and creative skills and that you can get a ten day free trial by visiting lynda.com/tekzilla dot-com slash Paul link that one's new why because you've probably already seen a video online tech tips or awesomesauce network or any of the other channels on YouTube that lynda.com supports explaining what they are and what they do so whereas I will be using lynda.com to sharpen my skills over the next few weeks in areas like video editing business and photography for now you can say thank you to lynda.com for supporting YouTube creators like me by clicking the link in this video's description or visiting lynda.com/tekzilla so onto some benchmarks I'm going to do this part pretty much live and I also wanted to say a quick thank you to my hardware sponsors for the benchmarking system that I'll be using today Intel for the 59 30 K CPU EVGA for the x99 classified motherboard and g.skill for the Ripjaws for 16 gig ddr4 memory kit I'll be taking a look at overall performance as well as comparing the experience on a two gig gtx 960 versus the msi gtx 960 gaming 4 gig Edition I chose GTA 5 because it's the new hotness of course but also because the wide open world environment is a natural vram hog increasing settings like draw distance and traffic density will require the game engine to load more textures into the memory buffer and if it goes beyond to a gigabytes we should see the standard 960s performance tank but I wanted to take a look at some results here so first off and this is the MSI card here's some gpu-z results and I do want to point out that the GPU core clock actually gets up to 1404 right at the box I haven't done any overclocking with this and then these are my maximum results after I've gone through all three passes so you'll note in the memory used column right there goodness 3.4 gigs of memory being used and this is just a 1080 and GPU temperature only got up to 63 so that was one thing actually it was having a hard time getting these fans to spin up at first because the GPU wouldn't get warm enough but that's nice it's definitely very very to cooler with the Twin Frozr five right there I wanted to do some live testing with GTA 5 online so that's what I'm doing right now this is fraps up in the corner to show the framerate and I'm just going to play the game it's most fun I've had all day slowing down some pedestrians primary it's still holding pretty well 84 times the police officer okay I'm gonna change things up midway through and go to settings graphics and we're going to turn up 2x2 MSA and alright so yeah MSA a man that's kind of a nasty hit it goes from it goes from like 70 to 80 down to 60 which is not all that great I'd much rather be at 70 to 80 with everything set to maximum in the regular graphics menu but I didn't turn on any of the fancy stuff and the other graphics menu what I found out was first that you can die very easily online people will kill you the other thing is that I found out was basically that at 0 X msaa I was golden I was pretty much 70 to 80 FPS the whole time however when I put on the by 2 MSA my framerate dipped down to 50 to 60 ish which is not as good so my conclusion here is that the 960 with four gigs particularly this msi version which is very dark right now is great for grand theft auto 5 if you're on a bit of a budget however I would recommend keeping that MSAA setting turns to 0 X or messing with some other stuff if you want to keep well above 60 fps so now that you've looked at some numbers and some gameplay is the gtx 960 4 gig a good card for GTA 5 well i would say yes GTA 5 is actually a great port which it damn well better be after rockstar made us wait for so long and even budget cards can perform pretty well as long as you're willing to reduce few settings here and there you might not be able to turn all the eye candy all the way up with a gtx 960 but the added memory means you won't hit a wall at 2 gigs of usage and in my opinion draw distance was one of the more important things that i always liked to max out in a game like GTA 5 msi gtx 960 gaming 4 gigabyte edition is a great take on this card - and I really like that MSI managed to mane premium feel of their flagship cards in this much more budget-friendly version but let me know if you agree with me in the comments though you're also welcome to hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already and if you are interested in supporting me further you can check out my store where you can buy t-shirts not KB Mon t-shirts but t-shirts with my logo on them and you can also use my amazon link before you buy stuff on Amazon that helps me out a ton as well thanks for watching everyone and we'll see you next time you