eventually materialized. Given just
how competent the GTX 760 was and
on the opposite end the ill-received
AMD Radeon R9 285. The GTX 960
was always going to have an uphill
battle right from the start.
Kitted in what is essentially half
a GTX 980 in all respects, the GTX
960 plays all modern games very
well at 1080P as you can see in
the results. With 2GiB of GDDR5
at an impressive 7GHz alongside
NVIDIA’s compression algorithms.
The GTX 960 has managed to make
its relatively narrow 128-bit bus and
112GB/s memory bandwidth go a
lot further than it otherwise would.
With just 1024 compute cores or as
NVIDIA calls them, CUDA cores, the
960 is most certainly a full GM204
core cut right down the middle.
The core is around 44% smaller
as well which is also fitting given
the specifications. API support is
identical to that of the other 900
series GPUs, which translates in
DirectX12 support and OpenGL 4.5
compliance to say the least. As far
as feature support goes, you are
covered for the foreseeable future.
When I looked at the cooling used
on the GTX 960. I found that the
PCB is actually shorter than the
WINDFORCE 3X heat sink and fan
combo. It actually makes the card
20 The OverClocker Issue 33 | 2015
the longest GTX 960 on the market,
so if space is tight in your case you
may have to look at the other GTX
960 from GIGABYTE. Using a heat
sink that is capable of dissipating
300Watts of heat from a 160Watt
or so GPU is sure to offer some
noteworthy cooling performance.
During the entire time while testing
the card it was rare to have the
fan spin up at all. This is true for
other GTX 960s on the market from
competing vendors, but in the case
of the GIGABYTE card it was only
in Unigine Heaven Xtreme preset
(HWBOT version) with the card
overclocked where the fans would
spin. Nothing prevents you from
setting your own fan speed using
GIGABYTE OC GURU Software, but
the card manages well on its own
regulating temperatures as and
when necessary. With the standard
fan profile, it does ensure that boost
clocks remain consistent, which is
welcomed as it does boost relatively
high compared to other GTX 960
cards.
Visually, this isn’t the best looking
GTX 960 o the market, that honour
still goes to the MSI Gaming series
which is simpler in comparison but
has a design that makes it look a
little classier. That isn’t to say the
G1 Gaming is unsightly. Rather, it is
an improvement over the previous
generation cards from GIGABYTE,
but has not made the bold move to a
cooler that leaps out at you making
you take notice. I do appreciate
the back plate for a variety of
reasons and it is one of the areas
where GIGABYTE has one up on
the competition. It doesn’t serve
to cool the card by any means but
does protect it from any handling
mishap which may cause damage to
the components. If you add the
custom lighting effects to it as well,
you end up with a graphics card that
looks better in a windowed system,
running than it does here in
pictures. Keeping the graphics card
well below the 66’c mark is
impressive for any cooler, but doing
so with overclocked settings while
gaming is nothing short of superb.
For that kind of cooling capability, I
would gladly suffer the longer card.
We then get to performance, what
most of us care primairly about over
anything else. Unfortunately
I did not have a reference GTX 960 as
there was no reference GTX 960 at
the time. So it is rather difficult to
contextualize the performance gains
that the massive overclock this card
ships with brings. The only thing I
could do is measure it against other
GPUs that are at present competing
with it. In this case that would be the
NVIDIA GTX 760 and the AMD