Gadgetory

excellent the gtx 960 has this connector right up here at the top that allows you to use two of the cards together at the same time it's called sli or a scalable link interface and the gtx 960 can support up to two way configurations for today's video I'm going to be going over one of EVGA Zanu gtx 960 s the SSC or super-super clocked and also be running some benchmarks to answer this sli question is two of these for $400 a viable gaming solution or should you opt for a single higher-end card like the gtx 970 or nine eight either way you should like this video before proceeding so let's start off with a closer look at EVGA s take on the GTX 960 the SSC version at least which will run you about two hundred and ten dollars MSRP there a CX 2.0 plus cooler design is very similar to what we've seen on their 970 and 980 models with some minor changes you still get double ball bearing fans which use less power and have a longer lifespan swept fan blades and a sizable fin stack beneath the plastic shroud the heatsink has been updated with three straight copper heat pipes or SHP straight heat pipes that extend the length of the card as well and like the 970 and the 980 the fans don't spin up at all until this GPU reaches 60 degrees Celsius or warmer EVGA calls this DB noise inverter because I guess all of the manufacturers decided to name their fans not spinning technology this year on the back you can see the black PCB no backplate unfortunately but if that's your thing you can step up - EVG BGA's FTW or for the win version of the gtx 960 which does include a backplate there is a I'm going to call it a front plate between the cooler and the PCB basically what this does is a memory and mosfet cooling solution that's going to keep those components about 10 degrees cooler compared to not having one on their EVGA also integrates a dual BIOS system with a switch right here physically on the board which allows you to have a backup BIOS ready in case of an extreme overclocking failure or to keep two profiles on tap and easily be able to switch between them this is a dual slot card length is 10.1 inches or 250 millimeters and EVGA also improved the power delivery over the reference design by adding a six plus to phase power delivery system and a peg an 8-pin peg power connector instead of a six pin and an optimized power target that provides 33% more power to the GPU according to EVGA a four watt power supply is recommended video outs include three DisplayPort 1.2 s1 HDMI 2.0 and one dual link DVI with a single card my maximum GPU temperature during testing was 72 degrees Celsius average power draw was about 250 watts under load never peaking above 300 so very very power efficient just like the 970 and 980 when it comes to the core component tree you'll find the GM 206 GPU right at the center of this which EVGA has overclocked to 1279 megahertz based and 1342 megahertz boost frequency during testing this card actually boost it up all the way to 1418 megahertz right out the box from the manufacturer and in a two way configuration both of the GPUs were humming along at about 1404 without any manual overclocking lastly we have two gigabytes of gddr5 memory on a 128-bit bus and this has been a sticking point with some folks particularly those who were hoping that this card could handle some entry-level 4k gaming feel free to check out my first gtx 960 video where i show that this card should really only be considered for 1080 gaming but what about two of them well let's check out some sli benchmarks so thank you once again to Intel and EVGA and g.skill for providing the 59 60 X X 99 classified and the Ripjaws ddr4 memory kit used in my test bed also remember that the two gigabyte frame buffer in the 960 does not add up to 4 gigabytes when you SLI two of them together there's still just two gigs per GPU which is not going to help out the high res benchmarks and yes is alive the EVGA gtx 960 and the zotac 960 for these tests because that's - that I have it's heresy I know 3d mark firestrike ultra is pretty brutal at 4k so although we saw decent sli scaling on normal and extreme mode ultra maxed out the 2gig memory buffer and caused enough slowdown to negate any benefits BioShock Infinite continues this trend we see decent scaling 1080 and 1440 but not so much at 4k if you're just looking at average frame rate the 960 sli will usually land between the 970 and 980 at standard HD resolution as graphically intense as Metro last light is the built in benchmark actually doesn't use more than two gigs even at 4k so here you can see the sli 960s doing a bit better at 4k and beating out the 970 now I usually rate anything less than 10 FPS as unplayable so I have no idea how I got through the SLI 960 benchmark run in Crysis 3 it was pretty terrible that said it was actually able to best the GTX 980 at 1080p here the battlefield 4 numbers again also reinforced this trend again we have pretty good scaling at 1080p and just a note to anyone trying to play battlefield 4 at 4k with a GTX 960 please don't and so it last we come to the conclusion if you watched my intro video for the GTX 960 then you know that I would have liked to have seen just a little bit more from this GPU and then I was saddened by the relatively small memory buffer and the 128 bit interface don't get me wrong though if you're gaming at 1080 and there's nothing wrong with that and you don't plan to upgrade your monitor for let's say the next year or two and there's also nothing wrong with that this is a very great budget card with very low power requirements I also like EVGA is take on the gtx 960 SSC which runs very cool and very quiet although i and the coalition of tech youtubers will continue to give them grief for the lack of backplate when many other vendors are using them even on lower tier models we know that you have back plates EVGA and we want them but sli though do i recommend it with the gtx 960 know like pretty much straight up no but why well i usually don't recommend multi-gpu setups at all when a single more powerful GPU is available the reason is sli scaling can be a huge issue with games although most of the games I tested today do have good SLI scaling their triple-a titles this isn't always the case in many games you'll get zero benefit with the second card or even a slightly lower frame rate with two cards versus one the single situation that I can see sli working for this configuration or for this GPU is if you have a monitor like this one right here to my right this is the Asus 1080p 144 Hertz high refresh rate this is the 120 but it's a high refresh rate monitor and I can see a 960 SL is getting you closer to 120 or 144 FPS to match the refresh rate of your monitor and you wouldn't really have to worry as much about memory limitations because you're still 1920 by 1080 for a 60 Hertz 1080 I think a single 960 does just fine and for any higher anything that uses a higher resolution than that I think you'd be better off with a GTX 970 or an AMD r9 290 for that matter given the tantalizing price drops that team red has been responding to this launch with and that's all for this video thank you guys so much for watching don't forget to hit the like button don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channel if you haven't already for more tech videos and we'll see you next time you