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Five GeForce GTX 960 cards overclocked

Scott Wasson
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I hate to brag, but I kinda know what I’m doing here. I’ve been reviewing PC components since the dawn of human history, or least since the last century, which is pretty much forever in Internet time. I’ve reviewed a lot of stuff, and a big chunk of that stuff has been video cards.

What I’m saying is that I should have the basics of this gig down pretty well by now. One would think.

Yet my attempt to cover a bunch of GeForce GTX 960 cards has left me flummoxed. I can’t seem to get my head around how to approach it. Part of the problem is that I already looked at these five different flavors of the GeForce GTX 960 in my initial review of the GPU. I tested their power draw and noise levels, and I compared their performance. I then resolved to do a follow-up article to look at the individual cards in more detail, along with some overclocking attempts.

Seems simple, right? Yet as I sit here and attempt to pull together this article, I’m struggling to make it work.


What am I supposed to make of this bunch?

Part of the problem has to do with the nature of the GeForce GTX 960 and the video cards based on it. You see, with its Maxwell architecture, Nvidia has sought to make its GPUs much more power-efficient than in the past. The result is a chip that doesn’t consume much more power than the old GeForce GTX 660 while offering tremendously more performance. Meanwhile, the video card makers have all been hard at work refining their coolers to evacuate lots of heat with very little noise. They’ve added more copper, more heatpipes, and more heatsink area. Twin fans are the norm, and one of these cards has triple fans on an extra-long cooler. Beyond that, all of these coolers have a nifty, semi-passive cooling policy where the fans don’t spin up when the GPU is at idle or lightly loaded.

Both of these trends are good ones. Rising power efficiency is always welcome, as is more effective, quieter cooling. The convergence of these trends is a good thing, too. All of these GTX 960 cards—from the likes of EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus—are truly excellent. The contrast with comparable offerings from just a few short years ago is striking.


Just look at this EVGA card with an ACX 2.0 cooler. Look at it!

As a reviewer, though, these cards present me with a real problem: they’re too darned good. In the past, five different video cards based on the same GPU might perform about the same, but the cooling solutions and such would give me something to talk about, something to compare. When I tested this group of GTX 960s, though, they were all so quiet, they didn’t exceed the noise floor of my tranquil basement lab—not even under full load running Crysis 3.

At the same time, none of the GPU temperatures reached the 70°C mark. As I said before, these coolers are complete freaking overkill—in the best possible way.

What am I supposed to complain about now?


Probably not these coolers. They’re spectacular.

Some people seem to be disappointed that these GTX 960 cards don’t ship with 4GB of RAM onboard. Perhaps I could muster some concern about that fact. But it’s hard to do so when higher-end cards with 2GB have served me well for the past few years while gaming at 2560×1440—and the latest TR Hardware Survey tells me that over two-thirds of our readers still have monitor resolutions of 1920×1200 or lower. Also, no other GTX 960 cards out there have 4GB of RAM, nor does the competing Radeon R9 285. I could be persuaded that spending more for a faster video card with more RAM is a good idea. Heck, I’m all about dat GPU power. But I’m still convinced these GeForce GTX 960 2GB cards are best-in-class offerings.

GPU
base
clock
(MHz)
GPU
boost
clock
(MHz)
GDDR5
clock
speed
(MHz)
Power
connector
Length Height
above
PCIe
slot top
Intro
price
GTX
960 reference
1126 1178 1753 6-pin N/A N/A $199
Asus
Strix GTX 960
1253 1317 1800 6-pin 8.5″ 0.75″ $209
EVGA
GTX 960 SSC
1279 1342 1753 8-pin 10.25″ 0.25″ $209
Gigabyte
Windforce
GTX
960
1216 1279 1753 Dual 6-pin 10″ 0.25″ $209
Gigabyte
G1 Gaming
GTX
960
1241 1304 1753 Dual 6-pin 11.25″ 0.3125″ $229
MSI
GTX
960 Gaming 2G
1216 1279 1753 8-pin 10.75″ 1.125″ $209-219

I guess I could spend some time worrying about installation requirements. After all, some of the boards are pretty long, and the MSI card in particular has heatpipes that sprout up over an inch beyond the top of the expansion slot covers. If the guts of your target PC case is too small, then you may want to avoid the larger cards.


The Strix is the lightweight of the bunch

Heck, there’s a case to be made that the very best product in this crowd might be the Asus Strix GTX 960. It’s the smallest of the lot, and it’s alone among the group in requiring a single six-pin aux power input. When all of the options are pretty much equally whisper quiet, there’s no need to go larger.

But then the Strix costs just as much as the boards with beefier hardware attached. If your case and PSU won’t be strained by something more formidable, why not indulge?


I’d grab this MSI card anytime

See, I don’t know. Pretty much all of these things are over-engineered. Do I take points off for being more over-engineered than the next guy? At the same price?

That said, there is one more way I can squeeze and strain these GTX 960 cards in order to bring out the differences between them.

Overclocking
Yep, I can overclock these babies. Surely that will bring out some differences between them, right?

Well, maybe. Overclocking a GeForce-based video card these days is complicated business. Don’t get me wrong. Pushing the little sliders around in the applications isn’t hard, but the clock speed and voltage sliders exposed in most tweaking applications are only two inputs in a pretty complex equation. Nvidia’s GPU Boost algorithm reacts to a host of variables when considering how hard to push the GPU, and it works differently in response to different workloads.

For example, consider how these GTX 960s perform at their stock speeds while running the most GPU-intensive workload we know, MSI’s Kombustor app, which is based on FurMark.

GPU
base
clock
(MHz)
GPU
boost
clock
(MHz)
Memory
clock
(MHz)
Kombustor
GPU
voltage
Kombustor
GPU
clock
(MHz)
Asus
Strix GTX 960
1253 1317 7200 1.212 1417
EVGA
GTX 960 SSC
1279 1342 7012 1.181 1418
Gigabyte
Windforce GTX 960
1216 1279 7012 1.200 1468
Gigabyte
G1 Gaming GTX 960
1241 1304 7012 1.187 1468
MSI
Gaming GTX 960 2G
1216 1279 7012 1.187 1392

Although the EVGA GTX 960 SSC (Super Superclocked, ladies and gentlemen) has the highest base and boost clocks of the bunch, its operating frequency in Kombustor is within 1MHz of the Asus Strix. The Strix has markedly lower advertised clock speeds, but it gives the GPU a bit more voltage by default. In the end, the result is virtually the exact same clock speed in Kombustor.

And Kombustor is only one workload—kind of a peak thermal worst case. The cards will operate at different speeds when running games.

Although each of these products ships with its own branded tweaking utility, I decided to use EVGA’s Precision app for overclocking each of them. Precision is one of my favorite GeForce tweaking utilities, along with MSI’s Afterburner.

My approach was to max out the power and voltage sliders for each card. From there, I raised the GPU and memory clocks while running Kombustor and checking for three things:

  • Stability — Does it crash?
  • Visual artifacts — Do Kombustor’s images render correctly?
  • Delivered speeds — Does turning up the slider actually mean increased clock frequencies?

Here’s how far I was able to push each of the cards.

GPU
clock
offset
(MHz)
Memory
speed
(GT/s)
Kombustor
GPU
voltage
Kombustor
GPU
clock
(MHz)
Kombustor
GPU
temp. (°C)
Asus
Strix GTX 960 OC
+80 8000 1.212 1497 57
EVGA
GTX 960 SSC OC
+75 7840 1.225 1518 68
Gigabyte
Windforce GTX 960
OC
+40 8000 1.243 1533 64
Gigabyte
G1 Gaming GTX 960
OC
+50 8000 1.231 1543 66
MSI
Gaming GTX 960 2G
OC
+110 8000 1.231 1528 63

All of them were able to tolerate memory speeds of about 8 GT/s. The one exception was the EVGA, which showed some artifacts in Kombustor, forcing me to lower its memory clocks slightly. That’s almost surely just bad luck on EVGA’s part, since each card comes with a number of memory chips onboard. Not all of those chips are going to tolerate overclocking well.

Although GPU overclocking also depends to some extent on luck, in terms of what speed and voltage combinations your individual GPU can handle, there’s a clear trend in these results. The cards with higher voltages are able to achieve higher stable GPU clock speeds in Kombustor. We’ve seen this before with recent Nvidia GPUs. The main limiting factor in overclocking is the amount of voltage the card can supply to the chip.

The two Gigabyte offerings fare best in terms of delivered, stable clock speeds in Kombustor. Gigabyte’s press materials strongly stressed stable clocks with Furmark, and the firm supplied us with a firmware update for each of its two cards that’s expressly intended to help with overclocking. (The company tells us these firmware updates will be available to the public, and they do appear to be.) My sense is that Gigabyte knows reviewers use Furmark (and its derivatives like Kombustor) for testing and thus has tweaked its firmware to handle this workload well. Clever girl.

That said, Gigabyte also offers some of the highest GPU voltages we’ve seen, so its cards appear to come by these clock speeds honestly. (In fact, for each and every GTX 960 card we tested, the GPU Boost “reasons” flag that limited overclocked speeds was either VOp, VRel, or a combination of the two.)

The other thing to notice in the table above is the GPU temperatures under load. Once again, they never reach the 70°C mark. What’s freaky is that, again, none of the coolers have to work particularly hard in order to keep the GPUs cool. I didn’t notice any of these cards, while overclocked, audibly increasing their fan speeds beyond the lowest level. I opted not to measure fan noise when overclocked because I’m pretty sure none of the cards would surpass the noise floor in Damage Labs. Jeez.

I’d like to call out the Asus Strix in the table above. That card didn’t allow us to increase its peak GPU voltage beyond the stock setting, and as a result, its peak GPU speed was a little lower than the rest. Notice, though, that the Strix also has the lowest GPU temperature in Kombustor, in spite of having the shortest cooler of the group. Asus obviously made different choices with this product than the other brands have.

Here’s how the GTX 960s perform at their stock speeds and while overclocked.

In actual games, the two leaders among the overclocked GTX 960 cards are the Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming and the MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2G. Apparently there is some magic in that “gaming” label after all. The rest of the pack kinda reshuffles its order depending on the test.

The truth, though, is that we’re looking at awfully minor differences between the fastest and slowest overclocked cards—a few frames per second at most. I’m afraid my quest to find meaningful differences between these products via overclocking has come to a humbling conclusion. I have failed.

Conclusions
What’s a guy to do when all five products in a group perform pretty much the same in every key respect?

I had some ideas related to price, based on the table of list prices on page one. Since all of these GTX 960 cards are cooled more than adequately, I figured I’d penalize the products that cost more because of their exotic coolers. MSI’s Twin Frozr is massive, and MSI gave us an initial price range of $209.99-219.99. There’s no reason to overpay, right? Then I went to Newegg, just now, and the MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2G is selling for $209.99. You can’t count the MSI out of the running based on price.

With a starting price of $229.99 and a massive, triple-fan cooler, Gigabyte’s G1 Gaming seemed like an easier target. After all, the dual-fan Gigabyte Windforce is an outstanding product, and there’s no reason to pay more than its $209.99 list. But guess what? The G1 gaming is also selling for $209.99 at Newegg as I write these words. That longer cooler and third fan may not be necessary, but it also won’t cost you anything more.

In fact, all five of the cards we’ve tested are currently selling for $209.99 at Newegg, including the EVGA SSC, the Gigabyte Windforce and the Asus Strix.

So I’m still basically lost here.

Oh, sure, there are additional things that set these cards apart from one another. For instance, the two Gigabyte offerings have a second DVI port that some folks might appreciate. The MSI Gaming 2G’s cooler has an LED-illuminated dragon that will appeal to folks with a particular sense of style in a way that nothing else here can. EVGA has a strong reputation for U.S.-based service and support. And so on.

But all of these cards are fantastic products. They all come with three-year warranties. All ship with more cooler than the GPU will ever need. They all cost the same. Some are larger, require more space and power, and perform slightly better. Others are smaller, require less space, and run ever so slightly slower when overclocked to the max. Which one you should choose depends on your particular tastes and requirements. That is perhaps the most boring, undramatic conclusion possible for a review like this one. But in this case, it’s also the inescapable truth. Take your pick.

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