GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 Gaming Review

It’s here! The NVIDIA GTX 960 mid-range graphics core based on ‘Maxwell’ technology. We take a look at the GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 Gaming…

Product on Review: GV-N960G1 GAMING-2GD
Manufacturer & Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £194.99 GBP

Our first NVIDIA GTX 960 Review comes in the form of the new GIGABYTE G1 GAMING series. This new group features a redesigned Windforce cooler FLEX display technology while also being overclocked from the factory. We’ve examined the Windforce cooler in great depth on numerous occasions and will continue to do with this variant which has some very neat touches. However, the big attraction with this card is the new GTX 960 core from NVIDIA – code named ‘Maxwell’. Itself, a variant of the full fat Maxwell core found on the GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards from the same family, this version is a trimmed down core which still features many of those found on the GTX 960’s stablemates. Power saving is the main attraction here.

The GTX 980s and GTX 970s while being fine examples of graphics cards in their own right failed to thoroughly impress us in that the main attraction being power saving. Sure there were performance improvements over their forbears but power saving is not a key feature most end users will look for when opting for a flagship product. Out right performance is key there. Not so with a mid range card where value for money encompasses all attributes not just the purchase cost but also running costs and here is where the Maxwell core scores big.

Over the next 20 or so pages we will examine the GIGABYTE G1 Gaming in great detail as you expect here at Vortez and will be comparing this graphics card against the previous GTX 760, another GTX 960 and of course the GTX 960’s main competition, the AMD R9-280 and R9-285.

About GIGABYTE:

GIGABYTE was founded in 1986, establishing our uncontested position in continuous technological innovation. By focusing on key technologies and achieving strict quality standards, GIGABYTE has been regarded as an innovative and trusted motherboard leader in the globe. To keep pace in a rapidly changing world, we have offered a comprehensive product line covering Motherboards, Graphics Cards, PC Components, PC Peripherals, Laptops, Slate Devices, Desktop PCs, Network Communications, Servers and Mobile Phones. We are dedicated to building up a full-range digital life, responding promptly and sonorously to consumer needs and desires.

Specification

GPU GeForce GTX 960
Core Base Clock 1241 MHz(std. 1127)

Core Boost Clock 1304 MHz(std. 1178)

Memory Clock 7010 MHz

Memory Size 2048MB GDDR5

Bus Type PCI Express 3.0

Memory Bus 128-bit

CUDA Cores 1024

Memory type GDDR5 128Mx32

DirectX 12

OPENGL 4.4

DVI Port DVI-I /DVI-D

DisplayPort 1.2 *3

HDMI 2.0 *1 (support 4K@60Hz)

While we will be covering the main features of the new GTX 960 on the next page, we feel it is important to stress that this card will not throttle, even under the highest loads as exampled below during a run of Furmark, validated by ourselves.

GTX 960 Features

Widely regarded as the sweet spot and backed up by statistical data from Steam users, the GTX760 and GTX660 are #1 and #2 most popular. So the market is clearly there and NVIDIA are clearly not oblivious to this fact as they’re hoping some of those users upgrade to the next generation in gaming graphics cards, the GTX 960.

Compared to the GTX 660, the GTX 960 offers a huge leap in terms of both performance and features including VXGI and MFAA along with support for Microsoft’s soon to be released DirectX. NVIDIA claim a 60% increase in performance which is a massive leap all things considered. MOBA games on 4K promise to run so much sweeter with the GTX960 when compared to the GTX 660 thanks to the extra grunt afforded to the GTX 960 and so using features such as 4K DSR instead of 8xMSAA, the GTX 960 gives a greater amount of clarity.

Feature wise, the GTX 960 retains all of the new innovations first presented with the GTX 980, the common theme being efficiency. The Maxwell SMM is partitioned into four distinct 32-CUDA core processing blocks, each with its own dedicated resources for scheduling and instruction buffering. Because each block is given its own instruction set the CUDA cores are utilised more often in an active state thus improving workload and efficiency. Enhancing efficiencies further, each of the SMM units feature their own 96kb of shared memory compared to the smaller 64KB of shared memory found on the previous generation Kepler core.

Broadly speaking, these changes mean that the GM206 is capable of delivering around 1.4x the performance per core of the GK106 Kepler while being twice as powerful per watt used. Pretty impressive when you consider that Kepler was hardly power hungry beast. There seems to be a common theme appearing in that NVIDIA are involved in a ‘tick-tock’ scenario. Tick being performance improvements (Kepler), Tock being power efficiencies (Maxwell). It is however worth noting that this time around Maxwell not only improves on efficiency but performance, as we will see, also gets a healthy boost.

Aside from the core, the memory sub-system has also seen a refresh thanks to NVIDIA’s third gen delta colour compression engine which allows the GPU to better utilise available memory bandwidth. This leap isn’t as significant as the improvements in the core design with the stock GM206 managing 148.8GB/s against 144.2/s in the GTX 660 (GK106).

NVIDIA are making some bold claims with the GTX 960. First they are claiming that the GTX 960 will offer a ‘great gaming experience’ at 1080p settings with the anti-aliasing turned up. Perhaps even more ambitiously, that it can churn out playable frame rates at 4K resolutions (albeit with less GPU intensive game types such as MOBA.

Stock speeds are levelled at 1126MHz on the core with a boost speed of up to 1178MHz and the memory speed (effective) will be set at 7010MHz. As with the GTX 970 and GTX 980 line of graphics cards we expect to see, as with this review, these levels to be raised in factory overclocked graphics cards.

The GTX 960 will replace the GTX 970 in NVIDIA’s current GTX line up with the entire family as follows:

GeForce GTX TITAN Z
GeForce GTX 980
GeForce GTX 970
GeForce GTX 960
GeForce GTX 750 Ti
GeForce GTX 750

DSR & MFAA

Dynamic Super-Resolution

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) isn’t a new concept, but its adoption in games or graphics hardware over the years has been patchy due how processor-intensive the process is. It relies on sampling the scene at a resolution much higher than your native screen resolution and then blending pixels together to output a ‘normal’ resolution frame, reducing ‘jaggies’. It’s often colloquially referred to as the ‘king of AA techniques’, but has given way to MSAA, MLAA and NVIDIA’s own FXAA, each of which are faster and less computationally expensive even if the quality isn’t as good.

Progress in graphics technology and horsepower has meant that a game which would bring a GPU to its knees five years ago can be comfortably played on mid-range hardware these days, whilst top-tier hardware push frame rates well into the hundreds. That’s a lot of horsepower going to waste when it could, if the game supported it, be used to improve image quality significantly.

Relatively recently enthusiasts have used a homebrew technique to increase the resolution which a game engine renders at, and then apply post-processing techniques to reduce the output resolution down to the monitor’s native. Known as downsampling, it’s essentially a form of SSAA. Unfortunately it’s very hit-and-miss, often relying of 3rd-party applications and prone to throwing up OS-level errors; and of course it’s very computationally expensive. However the rewards – beautiful images from older game engines – make the effort worth it.

Today GPUs such as the GTX 780Ti and Titan are being produced which are capable of and designed for 4K resolutions in even modern titles. However most gamers still use 1080p monitors on a day-to-day basis, making a $500+ GPU obscene overkill for all but the most taxing of titles. Because of this NVIDIA are going to start to support downsampling at the driver level through a method they’re calling Dynamic Super-Resolution (DSR).

Composite scene, DSR sample on right

Using DSR (which can be enabled automatically through GeForce Experience or the driver application) the game is rendered at a higher resolution and then downscaled to the monitor native resolution. Unlike previous methods however tt’s fully integrated into the driver, meaning not only ubiquitous game support but also a far more stable process than the bespoke solutions previously used.

Whilst the potential image quality benefits are significant it’s also worth noting that DSR would be an excellent measure of assessing whether your setup is capable of supporting a higher resolution monitor in gaming. The performance impact of the downsampling process is apparently only 1-2% (i.e less than a frame per second), so the framerates you get running DSR at 4K on your 1080p monitor should be extremely close to those you get for 4K natively. We’re not sure if NVIDIA intended this, but we’ll certainly take it.

DSR is part of NVIDIA’s launch driver for the GTX 980 and 970, but will also be rolled down to Kepler in the near future. The current implementation is still a little rough around the edges and NVIDIA haven’t supplied a software means of easily showing the downsampled output frame as all in-engine screenshots will be at the supersample resolution, but it shows a great deal of promise.

Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing

Optimised anti-aliasing techniques is one of the ways GPU manufacturers have sought to differentiate themselves beyond pure frame rates and GFLOP statistics. Recognising that MSAA was insufficient to the needs of shader-based rendering and SSAA was too expensive both AMD and NVIDIA have generated their own methods to combat aliasing, to greater or lesser success. NVIDIA’s most well-known iteration is Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), initially requiring in-engine implementation but later enabled at the driver level. More recently Temporal Anti-Aliasing was debuted, cleaning up an image based on frame-by-frame changes to pixels around edges. Each has their pros and cons; a good way to get into a fight on enthusiast boards is to claim that one method is flat out better than the other.

Today Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing (MFAA, not to be mistaken for AMD’s Morphological Filtering AA) is being announced as a Maxwell-exclusive feature. As the name suggests MFAA is a post-processing anti-aliasing technique which operates by analysing a frame within the context of the previous frame, checking aliasing and rendering colours based on a proprietary algorithm in hardware.

The foundation of MFAA is multi-pixel programmable sampling, a means by which the matrix of sampling positions can be randomised to reduce data processing artefacts caused by repeating the same sample position from frame-to-frame.

MFAA seeks to be as good as MSAA, but without the performance impact algorithms and with image characteristics that are substantially different from FXAA. The latter has garnered a reputation for slightly blurring images, reducing the overall image quality, and so an effective alternative is probably due at this point.

Sadly MFAA is not quite ready for prime-time and will be issued as part of a driver update at a later date. The obvious question-mark is just how high the image quality presented is, and if it can operate well when the differences between frames is relatively large. However NVIDIA have clarified that the technique will work in tandem with alternate-frame rendering, an SLI mode available when using two or more matched NVIDIA GPUs.

Packaging & Accessories

The GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 Gaming packaging will be familiar to anyone who has seen a Windforce product previously. The ‘eye’ take pride of place with the product features beneath. Flipping the box over we find that GIGABYTE have broken down the GPU cooler to show the direction of airflow and have given us an explanation of GPU Gauntlet (GIGABYTE’s overclocking and monitoring tool) and FLEX display.

The accessories provided are a couple of molex-6pin PCIe power adaptors, driver/utility CD and the installation manual. This is enough to get you up and running but we would liked to have seen something a little extra here given this is a G1 Gaming SOC card such as a case badge etc.

First Look

The card is very long as far as mid-range graphics cards go. With the Windforce 3x cooler attached the card overhangs a standard motherboard by a good inch and measures 297mm from the backplate. It does however look great with the matt black metallic cooler and matching smoked translucent fans.

GIGABYTE have also added a backplate which has some cooling louvres cut out from the plate.

The devil is in the detail they say and GIGABYTE have left no stone unturned here with a very neat embossed emblem on the back of the base plate.

LED affectionados will be thrilled to hear the profile view of the GIGABYTE G1 Gaming cooler features not one, two but three separate illuminated emblems. the main GIGABYTE logo is illuminated when powered but astride this are Silent and STOP lettering which inform the user when the fans are moving or not (illuminated). A nice little feature that while useless in the grand scheme of things, will look pretty neat in a windowed case. Especially as you won’t be able to tell from noise alone if the fans are working or not.

A great feature of the GIGABYTE GTX 960 is FLEX. It allows multiple screen to be attached using a variety of inputs. This card comes with DVI-I, DVI-D, 3x Displayports and a HDMI giving the users a variety of options for multi-monitor gaming setups.

IF one card is not enough then you can add a further card from the same family (GTX 960) to benefit from SLI.

Power requirements of the card are a 400W PSU. For this card you will need either 4 spare MOLEX connectors or 2x 6pin PCIe power cables.

Closer Look

The three fans on the Windforce cooler have evolved slightly and now have slight triangular ridges along with grooved blades which GIGABYTE tell us smooths the airflow thereby reducing turbulence.

The cooling design is nothing short of exceptional. The G1-Gaming has a very neat looking full length backplate but sadly this does not cool any of the components on the rear of the PCB directly rather it is there for protection and aesthetic appeal. Not that we are complaining of course as we do prefer a GPU with a built in backplate.

The Windforce cooler has 3 separate fin arrays, the centre section uses direct contact copper pipes which aside from the thermal interface material touch the core for the most efficient transfer of heat from the core. Adjacent to the centre section there are a further two fin arrays, both of which are attached to the centre section by four oversized copper pipes. One section is directly attributable for keeping the VRM temps in check while the left most section is responsible for adding to the cooling capacity of the heatsink by providing more surface area.

With the heatsink removed we can see the exposed PCB of the graphics card which has a fairly standard layout. It is worth noting however that the memory is split by having 2 modules on the backplate side and two core-side.

The VRM is made up of a 6+2+1 power phase design. 6 chokes, each with 3 MOSFETs take care of the core power while a further two are reserved for the memory. the remaining choke is there for aux power.

The memory carries the product code of K4G41325FC-HC28 which tells us these chips come as a 4GB package (this card is 2GB) and are rated to run at 3500MHz (7000MHz effective speed) at 1.5v.

The core is slightly more oblong than other Maxwell cores due to the trimming down by NVIDIA. How this affects the performance of card we are about to find out…

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphic card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Frame Time Analysis
We have also seen the emergence of frame time analysis. We covered this in a separate article here: GPU Reviews: Why Frame Time Analysis is important so we won’t go into the reasoning again but to summarise, our testing comprises both FPS testing and perhaps arguably more importantly, frame time analysis. We also look at overall performance by equating averages across the games and finally before concluding our review we take a look at value for money.

HardwareWith the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X79 setup to the very latest X99 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic, achieveable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of GDDR4 at 2666MHz and a 500GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics cards on test:

GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 GAMING OC
NVIDIA Forceware 347.25
ASUS GTX 960 STRIX DirectCU IINVIDIA Forceware 347.25
SAPPHIRE DUAL-X OC R9-285 OC(Catalyst 14.3)
XFX R9-280 Black Edition OC 3GB GDDR5(Catalyst 14.3)
PALIT GTX 760GB 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 340.52)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR RM Series™ RM1000
Hard Drive – CORSAIR Force Series™ LX 512GB SATA 3 6Gb/s SSD
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2868 PQU

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we have chosen:

Battlefield 4
Watchdogs
Company of Heroes 2
Thief
GRID: 2
Metro: Last Light

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included 3 of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Temperature, Acoustics and Power Consumption

Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Furmark which was ran for 15 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Power saving and effeciency are the hallmarks of Maxwell and we see here this is borne true because despite needing an additional power cable compared to the ASUS STRIX, the card didn’t draw excessively more power and much less than the competition including the GTX 760.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result as the card did not throttle with this application.

We are big fans (excuse the pun) of the Windforce design here at Vortez however we have to question the need for such a large cooler on what is promoted to be a very cool running GPU. Despite it’s size it couldn’t quite beat the ASUS Strix but it was much cooler than the other cards on test.

Acoustics

The advances in this cooler have been small but have reduced either acoustics or heat or both. The ridges on the fans don;t appear to have made any massive improvements as this card is as quiet as the previous Windforce design we tested but our measuring equipment (ears) are perhaps not as tuned in as the techs at GIGABYTE so we will have to take their word for it that this is quieter than previous incarnations.

Overclocking

For overclocking today’s sample we will be using Sapphire’s TRIXX tool as this gives us all of the options we require included the additional voltage controls.

Above is a screenshot of GPU-Z showing the reference (factory overclocked) settings.

This card is advertised as a Super Overclock sample and while it is indeed overclocked from reference speeds it isn’t quite as fast as other GTX 960’s on release day. We found in testing that we couldn’t quite match the ASUS card when overclocking either falling a little short of the maximum attained by that card. This surprised us normally GIGABYTE graphics cards are amongst the best for overclocking so perhaps we just received a poor sample but nonetheless it wasn’t a shameful result – it is just we expected more from a card of this calibre. Worthy of note however that the boost speed was able to remain constant with just a slight drop over a period of 15 minutes within furmark.

Above we can see the resulting performance increase of the overclock via Unigine Heaven 4.0.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike (Synthetic)

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

Unigine: Heaven 4 (Synthetic)

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

Unigine: Valley (Synthetic)

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

Battlefield 4 (FPS)

Battlefield 4 is a 2013 first-person shooter video game developed by Swedish video game developer EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and is perhaps currently the most popular online First Person Shooter for PC gamers. It has an extremely powerful gaming engine that will stress components more than most FPS titles available.

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Watchdogs (Action/Adventure)

Watch Dogs is a 2014 open world action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Set within a fictionalized version of Chicago, Illinois, the single-player story follows a hacker and his efforts to seek revenge after the accidental death of his niece. The open world design lets players freely roam Chicago, which includes the urban city, open countryside, and slums. The game is played from a third-person perspective and its world is navigated on-foot or by vehicle. As such this is a very demanding game, especially when graphical options are turned up.

Thief (Stealth)

Thief is a stealth video game developed by the Canadian video game developer Eidos Montreal, and published by Square Enix. It is a revival of the cult classic Thief series of stealth games, of which it is the fourth game. Thief is set in a dark fantasy world inspired by Victorian, gothic, and steampunk aesthetics. Using a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 it makes for a challenging game to pitch against our range of components.

Company of Heroes 2 (RTS)

Company of Heroes 2 is a real-time strategy video game developed by Relic Entertainment. It is the sequel to the critically acclaimed 2006 game Company of Heroes.As with the original Company of Heroes, the game is set in World War II but with the focus on the Eastern Front, with players primarily controlling the side of the Soviet Red Army during various stages of the Eastern Front, from Operation Barbarossa to the Battle of Berlin. Company of Heroes 2 runs on Relic Entertainment’s proprietary Essence 3.0 game engine and is extremely demanding of both CPU and GPU.

Metro: Last Light (FPS)

Metro: Last Light is a single-player post-apocalyptic-themed first-person shooter video game with stealth and survival horror elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, part of the universe of the novel Metro 2033 and its sequels, written by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. The second of our FPS titles, it runs on the 4A gaming engine which again, has the capability to stress even the best GPU components.

GRID: 2 (Arcade Sim)

Grid 2 (stylised as GRID 2 and known as Race Driver Grid 2 in Japan) is a racing video game developed and published by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008’s Race Driver: Grid. The game includes numerous real world locations and cities such as Paris. It also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility. It uses the EGO 3.0 engine which while not overly challenging, is representative of games of this genre.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Conclusion

The latest core from NVIDIA has seen some great improvements, not just from a power efficiency point of view but also from an overall performance perspective. It betters both the AMD R9-280 and R9-285 graphics cards in the majority of tests we ran and also ran on considerably less power. The GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 Gaming is a stunner to look at, especially with the addition of LED highlighting which not only look the business but are also functional in operation. So what’s not to like?

Cooling performance, as expected from the Windforce cooler, was exceptional. Not only that but the additional power provided coupled with this cooling meant that this card should not throttle most intense scenarios. In our testing the card did throttle back slightly from 1379MHz to 1366MHz but this will have so little effect on FPS to be noticeable and it managed to maintain a higher clockspeed for longer compared to other models upon release. So while it may have a slightly lower clockspeed than the other GTX 960 we have reviewed today, under intense gaming sessions, we suspect that this will have little bearing as this card barely throttles back the core clockspeed (Boost speed) at all while others could potentially have a lower FPS due to a throttled clockspeed when placed under the same conditions for a given length of time. This is a very important factor to consider as It is all very well having a fast core clockspeed and boost clockspeed ‘out of the block’, what really matters is if the card can maintain this (or come close to maintaining) this clockspeed over a given length of time. The GIGABYTE G1-Gaming GTX 960 card can.

At the time of writing, the reference NVIDIA GTX 960 weighs in at just £159.99 GBP which represents good value for money. Due to the GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 Gaming having factory overclock and custom cooling variant this bumps up to £194.99 GBP – this represents good value, for a small supplementary cost you get a slightly faster card, better cooling over reference and quiet operation.

We loved the new cooling design regardless of whether it is needed here are not and GIGABYTE should not be overly criticised for employing overkill. The constant evolution of the design is great to see and each incarnation of the cooler sees an improvement over the previous version. The inclusion of the Silent/Stop notification on this version was a neat addition for which GIGABYTE should be commended as leaders in innovation and for this and the additional power and of course that humongous cooling design means they get our creative award. We thought long and hard on whether this card should be awarded Gold or Silver. Overkill it may well be, but should that mean it loses points? We don’t think so and while it is pipped by the competition in terms of outright speed, at least in short benchmark runs (which could change given throttling), there can be no denying any gamer would be happy to have this card sitting proudly in PCIe slot number 1.

To summarise:
The GIGABYTE GTX960 G1 Gaming is a monster of a graphics card. Cool, capable at 1080p and looks immense. If you are considering a mid-range card that won’t throttle back when you need it most then this has to be on your list of potential buys.

Pros
+ Good Performance at 1080p
+ Great Cooling
+ Great looking
+ Fair price
+ Innovative cooling design
+ Throttle Prevention

Cons
– Starts to suffer at higher settings
– Needs 2x 6pin power cables