ASUS STRIX GTX 960 Review - PAGE 1

With the new Maxwell-based GPUs, NVIDIA implemented a power efficient architecture that also brought its share of innovations to PC gaming. On top of the excellent performance levels achieved by the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, Maxwell-based GPUs offer some cool graphic features including VXGI for lighting effects, MFAA for less demanding AA sampling, and DSR for bringing 4k resolution feel to 1080p monitors on select games.

After the previous release of the GM204 based GTX 980 and GTX970 cards, NVIDIA is finally showing some love to budget-minded gamers looking for an upgrade with great performance to cost ratio, a crowd that usually opts for mid-range SKUs made for 1080p gaming. With the new GTX 960, NVIDIA is going for that specific mid-range market segment, or "sweet spot" as the green team dubbed it. This is a very competitive segment with multiple offerings available from AMD and NVIDIA, armed with prices that usually range between $200 and $250. The user base targeted here remains highly valued by GPU makers since it translates to a higher potential sales volume; knowing that two out of three gamers are still playing on GTX660 or older, the potential is definitely there.

The GTX 960 is built around the Maxwell GM206 which features the same revamped SM design introduced with previous Maxwell GPUs. This new GPU features two graphics processing clusters, each having a dedicated raster engine and four Streaming Multiprocessors or SMM for short. These SMMs are composed of four individual 32-CUDA core processing blocks, each having dedicated instruction scheduling and dispatch resourses. By crunching these numbers, we get a total of 1024 CUDA cores, 32 ROPs, and 64 texture units. In terms of memory, the GTX 960 comes with 2048MB of GDDR5 RAM running on a 128-bit interface for a total 112.16 GB/s bandwidth. With these specs, NVIDIA promises a 60% performance gain and twice the power efficiency over the GTX 660.

Today I will be looking at the factory overclocked ASUS STRIX GTX 960. This unit comes with the distinct owl-inspired shroud design the manufacturer has adopted for its STRIX line of cards. Under the red and black shroud, we find a DirectCU II cooling solution with 220% larger heatsink, four U-shaped heatpipes, and two fans powered by a very clever 0dB technology. The card's internal design is based on a custom black PCB with a 5-phase Power design using Super Alloy components for improved performance, efficiency, and enhanced overclocking. ASUS delivers this card with a factory overclock that comes in two flavors: Gaming mode and OC mode featuring 1291MHz and 1317MHz Boost clocks, respectively.

The ASUS STRIX GTX 960, and other GTX 960 cards from different manufacturers, will be available at your preferred retailers starting January 22nd, 2015. As expected, NVIDIA announced that the final pricing for GTX 960 is set at $199 USD for most SKUs. However, some non-reference cards will be offered at a slight price premium. The ASUS STRIX GTX 960 featured in this review is a perfect example, and will retail for $209 USD. NVIDIA shows quite the aggressive approach in terms of pricing compared to previous generation GPU launches in the same performance category, and this seems to be the trend for each new Maxwell GPU release.

Specifications:

Information courtesy of ASUS