Gadgetory

excellent the GeForce GTX 960 is invidious new sweet spot GPU and it's gonna cost you about $200 I'm gonna do the short version of this review right up front this card performs very well at its price point it uses significantly less power than the last generation gtx 760 and it's a recommended by for pc gaming at 1080p not last part about 1080p is very important but more on that later let's start the closer look at as o tex geforce gtx 960 this is the amp Edition which means it's over Clark from the manufacturer $210 MSRP and it has what ZOTAC is calling exo-armor that's the back plate on the back as well as the dark gray metal shroud it's got a wraparound backplate and then the cooler is what ZOTAC is calling a storm it has two fans on the front it also has two copper heat pipes at the middle they're very long though they go all the way across the base of the card then come back around and go all the way back across the top it's also got freeze technology so tech has lots of fun names for their stuff this year that means the fans don't spin up until the GPU reaches a certain temperature that's all the rage these days as such this card seems geared a little bit more towards silent operation its idles at about 40 degrees Celsius that's passively cooled of course with the fans not spinning and then since the fans stay at low rpms the temperatures do get up to the high 70s and low 80s under full load but that didn't result in throttling and remember Nvidia designed these GPUs to run at 80 degrees Celsius the upshot is that this card is very quiet it's only eight point two or 208 millimeters long and thanks to GPU boost the core clock out of the box is gonna wrap as high as one thousand four hundred and thirty megahertz I like the design of this card it's actually got a nice dark gray finish it's got some subtle kind of carbon-fiber ish accents a black PCB and then so tech gets extra bonus points for including that wraparound backplate just a single six pin Peggy connector is all that's needed since this card only draws about 120 watts max the zotac suspects say they recommend a 500 watt power supply for your whole system but Nvidia's reference card only says you need 400 watt power supply which I think he can get away with with this one because my max power draw under testing was less than 300 watts and that's with an overclocked 59 60 X the video outs on the back are the same as the 970 in the 980 what three DisplayPort 1.2 s1 HDMI 2.0 and a dual link DVI and you can power four displays from the single cart future sport is also pretty much the same as the 970 and 980 including the new dynamic super resolution g-sync and shield support GPU boost physics etc all that good stuff but now on to the gtx 960 core specs it's a brand new GPU it's called the GM 206 still Maxwell architecture but that's as opposed to the GM 204 that's used in the 1970 and 980 when I first saw the specs of the 960 I was actually a little bit confused I was surprised to see the memory configuration at least and over the past couple days I've had this internal argument with myself kind of coming at the gtx 960 from three different perspectives pc perspectives anyway the first perspective is actually invidious they made the 960 after all they know a thing or two about it I think in videos goal here is to jam as much performance as they can into a 200-dollar video card without cannibalizing the sales of their other cards like the GTX 970 so you have 1,024 cuda cores and they've juiced the GPU base clock to 11:26 and the boost to 1178 but most cards like ZOTAC see our shipping overclocked to even higher than that but they also did some things to slow down the cards performance and it's pretty clear to me at least that this was to keep the card from over performing at higher resolutions there's 32 ROP units which is half of what the 970 has for example and only 2 gigabytes of memory on a 128 bit bus the GTX 760 also had 2 gigabytes of memory by default but it was on a 256 bit bus which just kind of feels like a step backwards ok if you can't already tell the second perspective from the three I mentioned earlier is my own and I am horribly spoiled by access to high-end PC hardware and 4k monitors and all that kind of thing so when I start to agitate over these design choices I have to remind myself to calm down that this is really just a $200 card whereas the gtx 660 and 760 for example were more in the 250 dollar range at launch I also think that I was so happy with the bang for your buck that was the GTX 970 release that I guess I kind of thought it would just always be that way anyway the third perspective since you're probably wondering is that's of a pretty standard PC gamer who might not have a lot of money to spend and who is perfectly happy with their 1080p monitor for the foreseeable future ultimately I could only resolve this with benchmarks so that's next so something used to point out as we look at hardware specs yes my testbed is super awesome and thanks to Intel and EVGA and g.skill for the CPU mobo and memory also I wanted to throw in a GTX 760 for comparison and the only one I have is EVGA is 4 gigabyte for the win version so bear in mind how having more memory helps its performance especially at high resolutions also I do have an hour 9 to ATX I was going to do comparisons from team red but it failed spectacularly on me right at go time so my apology my apologies for the lack of AMD representation at least in this video we'll do the comparison video in the future 3d mark this is the only test I ran at 4k and here is the best example of why the 960 is a 1080 card grade of 1080 miserable and ultra as the GTX 960 is doing its job in my opinion it should perform about 30 percent lower than the GTX 970 on to Bioshock Infinite's the GTX 960 s marginal performance boost over the 760 didn't impress me much here I ran most tests with 4x anti-aliasing and AAA is something you want a lot of memory bandwidth for still it's setting about where it should compare to the 970 Metro last light this one is always a killer but I thought the 960 did a good job keeping the minimum frame rate from dipping too low and even hitting well over 30 FPS average at 2560 by 1440 for Crysis 3 the GTX 760 wins here even at 1080 and I think that can be attributed to anti aliasing and the heavy load that CryEngine puts on the GPU also reminder once again that the GTX 760 has 4 gigabytes whereas the 960 has only 2 and lastly battlefield 4 I actually think the thing that impressed me most was that you can finally get a card that holds above 60 FPS average playing Battlefield 4 on 1080 ultra settings for $200 so now that we've seen some numbers how things look for the gtx 960 well from an videos perspective i think they did their job the card costs less than the gtx 760 in just a week or two ago it holds its own gameplay and it even won't threaten their upper tier offerings that are designed for higher resolutions for about two-thirds of the price of a GTX 970 you get about two-thirds of the performance from a my perspective I would have liked to see just just a little bit more from the GTX 960 and the past this tier of cart has seemed kinda like a gateway drug teasing you with the performance that nips at the heels of $400 cards in some situations I think when Nvidia is actually doing and to be clear I am just speculating here I know nothing is leaving a space open for the gtx 960 TI with maybe more memory bandwidth more ro peas more cuda cores also a 4 gigabyte version of the 960 will probably happen at some point if history is any indicator ultimately though i think it's the 1080p gamers perspective that is most important and i know there are a lot of you out there for you guys I think this card will do everything you want it to and I think you'll be happy with it I think this card could even hang with a 1440p monitor but you're probably gonna have to turn down some settings maybe reduce the anti-aliasing and that sort of thing to get a good framerate but let me know if you agree with me in the comments though don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already thank you guys so much for watching this video and we'll see you next time ultimately though I think it's the 1080p gamers perspective that is most important and I know there are a lot of you up very durable durable guys okay