Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Review

Verdict

Pros

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

Cons

• Surrounded by strong AMD competition
• Poor memory interface

Key Specifications

• Review Price: £160.00
• 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

What is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960?

The second generation of Nvidia ’ second Maxwell hardware arrived with the high-end GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards back in September, but it ’ sulfur taken until immediately for mainstream parts to arrive. That ’ sulfur where the GTX 960 comes in ; it ’ south designed for 1080p gambling, and its £160 price is far more palatable than its high-end stablemates.

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

Maxwell is all about achieving better performance while cutting power pulmonary tuberculosis. Nvidia has done this by rearranging its pour processors – the parts that do the heavy lifting inside a GPU core.
Nvidia has long arranged these processors into blocks called streaming multiprocessors, which are then crammed inside larger structures called Graphics Processing Clusters ( GPCs ). Cards from Nvidia ’ s former generation had 192 stream processors inside each multiprocessor, but that number has immediately been cut down to 128. Each multiprocessor now has its own schedule hardware, and the raw card has duplicate the count of geometry units when compared to last-generation GPUs.
There are four of those smaller multiprocessors inside each GPC, which allows Nvidia to delegate tasks with more preciseness – and, consequently, operate more frugally. It ’ s an improvement over the “ beast force ” approach used on older cards, like the GTX 760, which had two larger multiprocessors per GPC. Maxwell ’ sulfur revised GPCs don ’ triiodothyronine need deoxyadenosine monophosphate much resource-sharing hardware, either, which foster cuts down world power pull.

Maxwell ’ s more precise approach means fewer flow processors are used overall. The GTX 960 has 1,024 divided across two Graphics Processing Clusters, which is toss off on the 1,152 installed inside the older GTX 760. That ’ mho allowed clock speeds to increase : the GTX 960 ’ south effect runs at 1,127MHz with a maximal boost speed of 1,228MHz. The GTX 760, by line, was limited to 980MHz and 1,124MHz.

Nvidia ’ s changes result in a top out serve degree of 2,308 GFLOPs. That ’ s a minor improvement on the 2,257 GFLOPs of the GTX 760 but it does of course come with those ability saving benefits. It is, however, far below its AMD rivals, both of which offer at least 3,290 GFLOPs.
The GTX 960 ’ randomness memory shape international relations and security network ’ metric ton all that impressive. Its 2GB of GDDR5 is accessed using a 128-bit wide bus, which falls behind AMD ’ mho cards – the 280X used a 384-bit interface, while the R9 285 relies on 256-bit hardware. Nvidia ’ second memory is clocked to 1,753MHz, but we ’ ra not convinced that this higher speed will make up the deficit. The GTX 960 ’ second memory bandwidth sits at 224GB/s, which is higher than the R9 285 but lower than the R9 280X.
evidence of Maxwell ’ s increased efficiency can be seen at the back of every card. The GTX 960 requires good one six-pin exponent connection, which compares well to AMD ’ south hardware – the R9 285 needs two six-pin connectors, and the R9 280X needs a six- and eight-pin punch .

How We Tested

We ’ ve locked and loaded five games for this GPU test. Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and Crysis 3 all return from our former reviews, and we ’ ve added Metro : last Light and Batman : Arkham Origins to the mix. We ’ ve tested at 1,920 adam 1,080, 2,560 ten 1,440 and even 3,840 x 2,160 to see which calling card is best across single-screens – and to check if any of them can handle 4K.
We ’ ve used 3D Mark ’ second Fire Strike quiz and four Unigine Heaven benchmarks to test theoretical performance, and we ’ ve taken idle and load temperatures and power requirements to see which card is the cool and most economical.
Our test swindle consists of an Asus X79-Deluxe motherboard, Intel Core i7-4960X processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB intemperate magnetic disk.

To get prices for each menu we visited www.scan.co.uk and noted down the cheapest stock-speed circuit board we could find, although we will be referring to the diverse overclocked and pluck models available for each GPU, which will be more expensive, former on in the inspection .
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