Nvidia’s Maxwell generation hits a sweet spot
at a glance
(+) Aces of Spades
Great price-performance ratio; runs cool and quiet; power-efficient.
(-) Snake Eyes
AMD’s Omega drivers steal some thunder.
One of the nice things about PCs is that your budget has a wide range of entry points. If you don’t need the heavy lifting of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 or an AMD Radeon R9 290X, you don’t have to cough up hundreds of dollars for one. Both companies offer a variety of GPUs to fit your budget. Historically, Nvidia’s cards ending in “60”—like the 560, 660, and 760—have offered performance in between the premium cards and the more economical choices, putting them in a “Goldilocks zone” of balanced price and performance. Nvidia’s latest, the GTX 960, is no exception. With a 128-bit memory bus, a little over a thousand shader cores, and 2GB of VRAM, it’s not designed to be a giant leap over the GTX 660. But it’s not modest, either.
Let’s take a look at the Asus Strix DirectCU II OC Edition of the GTX 960. This mouthful of a card comes overclocked out of the box, and the company claims a 12 percent average increase in performance, versus Nvidia’s “reference” model. It features dual fans sitting on top of heatsinks that are fed by several heat pipes, and these fans are made to not spin until the GPU core heats up to 65 degrees Celsius. When it does, the Strix fans are designed to operate quietly, yet still run the chip cooler than the stock version. About 30 percent chillier, in fact. “DirectCU” refers to the copper heat pipes that are in direct contact with the GPU core.
The GTX 960 has a TDP of just 120 watts and only needs a six-pin PCI Express power cable (there are some eight-pin GTX 960s out there, though). Despite that, the Asus card also has an “OC mode” setting that increases its core clock speed to 1,253MHz and its boost clock to 1,317MHz. The default clock speeds of the GTX 960 are 1,126MHz and 1,178MHz, respectively, so it’s a sizable jump, but it still stays within the available power envelope of 150 watts (75W from the slot, and another 75W from the cable).
Smooth Operator
We tried something a little different this time and ran our benchmarks at 2560x1440 using Dynamic Super Resolution, instead of using an actual 1440p monitor. Technically, DSR uses ordered-grid super-sample antialiasing with a 13-tap Gaussian filter. In more straightforward terms, DSR takes a higher resolution than your monitor can display, squishes it down to fit, and applies a filter to enhance smoothness on the edges of objects in the game world. It can scale up to 3840x2160, also known as “4K,” and can stop at points in between, such as 2560x1440. A 1440p monitor has roughly 80 percent more pixels than a 1080p monitor, and it’s a common resolution for gamers with deeper pockets. AMD uses Virtual Super Resolution, which is more or less the same thing. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, however, didn’t cooperate with either DSR or VSR, so 2880x1620 was our closest alternative there.
We pitted this card primarily against AMD’s Radeon R9 285, which has roughly the same price point (though this ITX version is a bit higher). The GTX 960 has a 128-bit memory bus, while the 285 has a 256-bit bus, but it doesn’t make as much of a difference as you might think, thanks to some clever data compression techniques and improved shader core performance versus Nvidia’s older Kepler generation. Whether it was 1920x1080 or 2560x1440, the GTX 960 had little trouble keeping up. In fact, the 960 does a bit better in Tomb Raider, which is an AMD-backed game.
The GTX 960’s biggest threat is arguably the R9 290, which offers GTX 970–level performance at around $250—though we recommend no less than a 600-watt power supply, because the 290 has a TDP of 275 watts, and it’s not bluffing. More recently AMD’s “Omega” drivers have made some frankly unexpected strides in performance. Still, the GTX 960 produces pretty much the results it was designed to, at a price that we expected. It doesn’t hurt that this Asus Strix version runs super cool and quiet, despite being aggressively overclocked out-of-the-box.
$210, www.asus.com
| Specifcations | |
| CUDA Cores | 1,024 |
| Memory Clock | 7,200Mhz (GDDR5) |
| Memory Bus | 128-bit |
| Interface | 1x DVI-I, 1x HDMI 2.0, 3x DisplayPort |
| Dimensions (H x D x W) | 1.6 x 4.8 x 8.5 inches |
| Benchmarks | |||||
| Asus Strix DCU2 OC GTX 960 | MSI Twin Frozr III GTX 660 | Asus GTX 970 DC Mini | Sapphire R9 285 ITX Compact | AMD Radeon R9 290 | |
| Tomb Raider (fps) | 55 | 37 | 80 | 54 | 80 |
| Metro: Last Light (fps) | 34 | 23 | 47 | 34 | 48 |
| Batman: Arkham Origins (fps) | 45 |
36 | 68 | 51 | 75 |
| Hitman: Absolution (fps) | 23 | 17 | 39 | 30 | 50 |
| Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (fps) | 30 | 25 | 44 | 33 | 44 |
| Price (street) | $210 | $160 | $350 | $240 | $250 |
Best scores are bolded. Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition in an Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard with 16GB of DDR3/1600 and a Corsair AX1200 1,200-watt PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows 8.1. All games are run at 2560x1440 via DSR, except for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which was tested at 2880x1620.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1cH5Mke
