Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 | Graphics Card Reviews

Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Review

Experience next-generation gaming with GeForce® GTX 960—the perfect upgrade to the advanced performance, power efficiency, and realistic gameplay only NVIDIA Maxwell™ technology can offer.
The second generation of Nvidia’s Maxwell hardware arrived with the high-end GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards back in September, but it’s taken until now for mainstream parts to arrive. That's where the GTX 960 comes in; it's designed for 1080p gaming, and its £160 price is far more palatable than its high-end stablemates.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 card also has plenty of competition. AMD has a pair of mid-range parts that have been made more tempting because of recent price drops. There's the Radeon R9 285, which is ten pounds cheaper than Nvidia’s latest card, and the R9 280X that now starts at £175.

Overview

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 is a desktop graphics card of the upper middle class. It is based on the GM206 Maxwell chip that is produced in 28nm. The GTX960 offers 1024 shader cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs (no deactivated units of the chip). The graphics memory is usually 2 or 4 GB GDDR5 (7 GHz effective clock) connected with a 128 Bit interface.

The GM206 supports CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, GeForce Experience, Surround, GameStream, GPU Boost 2.0, Adaptive Vertical Sync / G-SYNC, SLI, DSR, MFAA and Virtual Reality latency improvements. The GTX 960 also includes a H.265 capable de- and encoder as a first.

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GTX 960 on the desktop without load is around 10 Watt and on a similar level to the AMD counterparts. During gaming the 960 reaches around 85-100 Watt (depending on the model) which is a lot less than e.g. the Radeon R9 285 (around 170 Watt).

KEY FEATURES

• 1,127MHz core clock
• 1,753MHz 2GB GDDR5 memory
• 2.9 billion transistors
• 1,024 stream processors
• requires 1 x 6-pin power connector
• Manufacturer: AMD
• Manufacturer: Nvidia

Positive And Negative Impacts Of  GTX 960

Pros

Solid 1080p performance
Low power consumption and temperatures
Available in ITX and overclocked versions

Cons

Surrounded by strong AMD competition
Poor memory interface

Sytem Suggestions

GeForce GTX 960 2GB is best suited for resolutions up to and including 1920x1080. We recommend a Strong Processor and 8GB of RAM for Optimal Performance.

Performance

At 1920x1080, the best suited resolution for GeForce GTX 960, benchmarks indicate its performance is a little over the older GeForce GTX 670.
Therefore, GeForce GTX 770 and even Radeon R9 280X are still faster, though less energy efficient.

Game Suggestions

• Assasins Creed Unity
• Far Cry 4
• Middle Earth Shadow Of Mordor
• Thief
• Alien Isolation
• Arma III

So the GTX 960 Can pretty much run a lot of games at high resolution but its not that quite dependable I mean it kinds of have low fps and well its not that much reliable if u wanna play a hardcore game in 4K resolution but I guess it is pretty cheap when it comes to price and it gets away with its low settings so if your under a tight budget I’d recommend this card.

Verdict

Nvidia’s most affordable 900-series card will play any game at 1080p while also handling some titles at higher resolutions, and we’re impressed with the efficiency of its revised Maxwell hardware: lower power consumption than the competition means that various small-form-factor models and overclocked models are readily available.

As such if you're simply after the Nvidia card with the best bang-for-buck right now then either of the AMD cards are probably the better choice, unless your power supply doesn't have sufficient PCI-E cables to power them. However, if you're building a system from scratch and your focus is on getting solid 1080p gaming performance for the minimum outlay then the GTX 960 makes more sense. It'll mean you can get a cheaper power supply and will then continue to save you money with its low power consumption.