EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SSC GAMING ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling Graphics Card 02G-P4-2966-KR

This review is for both the GTX 960 2G and 4G as I have owned both. Overview: The most important thing you want to know is if this is a good card, whether it can run modern games at high settings, and will it last me a few years. The short version is: Yes this is a great card that can run most modern games at high to ultra settings with 45-60FPS at 1080p, however the 2G version is a terrible purchase for future proofing, so do yourself a favor, pay the extra $30 and get the 4G. More games are requiring 2.5-3G for high to ultra settings at 1080p, so 2G just isn't enough anymore. How it runs: Now the card runs perfectly, as Nvidia does a great job with the drivers. I have had a few crashes, but mostly due to overclocking and the occasional updated driver issues). The card overclocks relatively well and quite easily using EVGA's Precision X or MSI afterburner, however you will only see around a 2-6 FPS boost even at max overclock with air cooling, so it's really up to you if you would prefer to risk it. The fans are silent when idle, and very quiet under load, and since case fans are much louder in general, you will probably not notice them. How it performs: Before we discuss the card, here are some benchmarks for the GTX courtesy of Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-960,4038-4.html As you can tell from the benchmarks, the GTX 960 is very middle of the road and runs most games at high or ultra settings at 48-60FPS at 10180p, and that is what you expect from a $200-240 card. Price wise you could probably get more frames per dollar with an Radeon R9 280X, Which is slightly more powerful at a lower price, but comes with 3G instead of 4G, and features AMD's less than stellar drivers so it is a bit of a toss up. The better question is whether you should simply fork over $100 more dollars and get the significantly better GTX 970 (Which technically only has 3.5G), which will take much longer before requiring an upgrade. Warning: ATTENTION HP PAVILION USERS WITH DESKTOPS MADE IN 12012 OR EARLIER. These graphics card will not post on many of the older HP Pavilion desktops (Specifically the ones that still use the Chicago Motherboard) because the card is incompatible with their very outdated bios. I had to return the 960 2G card for that reason, and ended up building a new PC from scratch with the 960 4G.

I plugged one of these into my DX58SO2 with PCIE 2.0 to replace two aging 460GTX in SLI (This card's system requirements say "PCIE, PCIE 2.0, or PCIE 3.0"). I got one warning that the system failed to POST, but I hit reset and the PC booted normally. After installing the latest drivers from Nvidia and rebooting, I fired up FarCry 4 and bumped the graphics settings to the "very high" preset. I got about 55-70FPS, peaked the temp at about 50 Celsius, and yes..the monkeys even had fur. Totally satisfied with my purchase, I shut down the game after playing for an hour and was watching some TV and thinking about which game I should try next..... ....and then..... ....my PC instantly powered off with no warning or blue screen. I hit the power button and it tried to power on for about half a second, then it stopped responding to the power button completely. Quite upset, I ordered a new power supply, and days later, put it in the system. With a great feeling of dread, I pushed the power button.....nothing.....So it now seems that the motherboard is dead. It's about 7 months out of warranty too! Now I have to buy a new motherboard, and probably a new CPU, and new RAM to go with it All to compliment the new power supply and the seemingly awesome and inexpensive new GTX960 that I was so excited about. For the skeptics, the Power supply was more than sufficient, the case was very clean and well ventilated. The CPU has a tower cooler with heat pipes and a year old application of arctic silver. Nothing was overclocked. Now I'm not going to come right out and say that this card fried my motherboard. I'll leave the readers to decide if it was operator error or even pure coincidence that the flagship Intel motherboard died 1 hour after installing this. Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is the fuzzy warm feeling I had from buying a decent display adapter upgrade at a reasonable price wore off very quickly. Update: New Power Supply, Motherboard, Memory, CPU, on top of this video card...and I am finally back to gaming again. So far I see no issues with the GXT960 SSC so far. Certainly nothing like what happened before. The card runs very cool, as you can guess by all the Nvidia promotional material touting it's cooling ability. I have to assume this means you have lots of room to overclock, but given the way the last 2 weeks have gone for me..I won't be overclocking for the time being. I sort of wonder why it's not clocked higher by default though if it's generating so little heat that the fans can turn off completely. As far as performance goes, I can get a solid synced 60 fps with pretty high quality settings in just about every game I've tried. Maybe not "Ultra" in a very modern game, but a respectable "High". Minecraft on the other hand runs like a champ, even with the highest possible quality settings using Optifine HD Ultra and 8x MSAA and 8x transparancy antialiasing. I get 120 FPS if I turn off vsync, or I can turn it on and limit the FPS to 60 and the card only uses about 30% of the GPU. Watch Dogs runs great at around "High", and while you can go higher and get 60fps most of the time, it's better to lower the quality a bit to make sure the FPS doesn't ever drop below 60. It's really not fun trying to make a turn at 120mph and having a FPS lag spike mess with your timing. One of these GTX960 cards absolutely beats the two GTX460 cards running in SLi that I had before. I don't need benchmarks to tell you that, it is clearly obvious with the naked eye.

Purchased for my first ever desktop computer custom build, designed for heavy gaming, but without blowing the bank account to smithereens, this graphics card really hit the right spot for me. To start with, I chose NVIDIA over AMD for two main reasons: 1 - AMD cards ALWAYS require more power, and use more power (substantially more) than the comparable NVIDIA cards (for example, this card will draw about 108 Watts in a gaming scenario, whereas the comparable AMD Radeon R9 285 in a comparable gaming scenario will draw about 176 Watts). No, this difference isn't going to destroy an electric bill, but over time, it would add up, making the AMD card more expensive in the long run. 2 - AMD cards typically run hotter than the comparable NVIDIA cards as well, not as much of a difference here, but I preferred to play it safe. Now why I chose the EVGA model? It didn't come down to much, just really chose something I figured would be solid. I really liked that this card had a backplate, as well as so many connectivity options. I also purchased the Super SuperClocked version, giving this card the biggest possible advantage for it being a 960, and EVGA's overclocking software is fairly convenient to use, especially when you're using one of their cards. On to actual thoughts: I really like this card. I had really high hopes for how it would perform, and it holds up to most of those. You won't be playing Dying Light or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt on completely maxed Ultra settings, that I can guarantee you. But it does stand up very well to modern titles and is completely capable of playing anything on the market right now, at varying qualities, but it can play most titles around about one step down from Ultra. It runs fairly cool, I need to rework my fan setup and some other cooling things in my case, but it does cool itself just fine, no worry of thermal bottlenecking. I was surprised by the weight when I got it out of the package, not to mention the size, this card is hefty to say the least. The coating is a matte finished black with some decals, and the backplate is a glossy black (nice feature by the way). The connection ports all come with black port blockers to keep dust and debris from causing connectivity issues, and it also comes with a power cable adapter, which most people will need to use, and it comes with a DVI to VGA adapter, so this can literally use nearly every display connection type there is, granted there is a clear bias towards Display Port with 3 of them being included. The card fit just fine in my Zalman Z11 Plus case, and works well with my ASUS Z97-A motherboard. ====================================================================================================== I will include game benchmarks scores for my rig with this graphics card in it: My Rig: Intel i5-4690K EVGA SSC NVIDIA GTX 960 4GB ASUS Z97-A 8GB DDR3 Corsair CX600M PSU Windows 10 Pro BioShock Infinite: Ultra ~ Maxed Settings - AVERAGE: 72 MINIMUM: 26 MAXIMUM: 117 Tomb Raider (2013): Ultra Preset - AVERAGE: 86 MINIMUM: 70 MAXIMUM: 102 Hitman: Absolution: Ultra Preset w/ MSAA OFF - AVERAGE: 70 MINIMUM: 58 MAXIMUM: 82 Thief: High Preset - AVERAGE: 60 MINIMUM: 49 MAXIMUM: 78 Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor: Very High Preset - AVERAGE: 64 MINIMUM: 46 MAXIMUM: 90 ARMA 2: ALL Settings on High - Benchmark 1 AVERAGE: 60 Benchmark 2 AVERAGE: 24 Metro 2033 Redux: High Preset w/ Tesselation on High, Texture Filtering on AF 16X, SSAA OFF, Advanced PhysX OFF - AVERAGE: 71 MINIMUM: 21 MAXIMUM: 222 Metro: Last Light: High Preset w/ Tesselation on High, SSAA OFF, Advanced PhysX OFF - AVERAGE: 69 MINIMUM: 22 MAXIMUM: 153 S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat: Extreme Preset - Day AVERAGE: 67 Day MINIMUM: 35 Day MAXIMUM: 99 Night AVERAGE: 72 Night MINIMUM: 44 Night MAXIMUM: 102 Rain AVERAGE: 76 Rain MINIMUM: 53 Rain MAXIMUM: 111 Sun-shafts AVERAGE: 51 Sun-shafts MINIMUM: 35 Sun-shafts MAXIMUM: 73 Just Cause 2: ALL Settings Maxed - The Dark Tower AVERAGE: 69 Desert Sunrise AVERAGE: 77 Concrete Jungle AVERAGE: 64 Far Cry 2: Ultra High Preset - Ranch - Long Benchmark AVERAGE: 117 MINIMUM: 66 MAXIMUM: 253 Sleeping Dogs: High Preset w/ NO HD Texture Pack - AVERAGE: 58 MINIMUM: 46 MAXIMUM: 63

GeForce GTX 960 was released this last Tuesday. I ordered mine on Tuesday night and had it delivered on Friday. I got the EVGA SuperClocked ACX (Advanced Cooling Extreme) version with 2 GB video memory. I was previously running a GTX 460 SuperClocked with 768 Mb of RAM. It was a decent card and still able to handle most of my games. Newer games off Steam like Natural Selection and Orion would not run due to having less than 1 GB of video memory. I also could not run the Skyrim high res texture pack. I could run Crysis 2 on high settings at 1280 x 780 or so. The single fan was reasonably quiet. This new GTX has a lower memory bandwidth (only 128 bit vs. 192 bit for the other card), however, nVidea has touted that the efficiency of the Maxwell chip makes up for the lower bandwidth. I cannot disagree with that sentiment. The 960 optimized all of my games through the GeForce Experience program and is running all of my games at 1920x1080 or greater. This is where it gets weird. I have a 1920x1080 monitor, but some games, like Skyrim and DOTA, will actually render at 2500x1700, then scale down to 1920x1080 to try to capture the detail of an even higher resolution monitor. This Dynamic Super Resolution worked beautifully on Skyrim. Everything looked crisp with enough haze on distant objects to give depth to the field of view. I did experience one frame rate drop when approaching a waterfall, but that was only after four hours of running Skyrim at 1.5x my native resolution with everything maxed on the HD texture pack. The card looks clean and fit easily in my micro ATX TX-381 case after moving some SATA cables out of the way. I would say that the dual fans cool well, but at this point, I do not think they have even had to spin up. This version of the EVGA GTX 960 has a small switch to operate in standard BIOS, which will only spin up the fans over 60* C or so, or performance BIOS, which keeps the fans on for extreme cooling. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Crysis 2, nor Skyrim even got the card hot enough to necessitate the fans. The triple-heatpipe heatsink seems to be cooling well enough with the air from my 120 mm intake fan blowing across it without needing its own two fans! I have only had the card for a day, but it has already exceeded my expectations.

I purchased this card with the sole intention of playing Fallout 4 on ultra settings, completely maxed out. I had read previous reviews stating that it played it flawlessly, but as usual, flawlessly is relative to every person's experience and opinion. I just finished building a high end gaming PC devoted to making Fallout run @ a steady 60FPS. Although I snagged this card for a ridiculous $185 during black Friday, it still didn't quite pay dividends for what I was hoping. While the game would average 53-60FPS for about 60-70% of the time, most scenes that took place inside buildings, in the rain, or in graphic/shaded heavy areas would easily drop into the 40FPS range, and at times would even hit the 30FPS range. I initially thought that overclocking it to the max safe speeds I'd found online would help, but the additional 50Mhz to the GPU and 500Mhz to the memory didn't squeeze much more performance out, at least as Fallout was concerned. I do realize that a GTX 970 is recommended by Bethesda if you want to max everything out, but I thought I could maybe squeeze by with this card. Nope...turns out they know what they are talking about afterall. I ended up going with an EVGA GTX 970 FTW+ in it's place, and as expected, it doesn't even break a sweat with Fallout 4 maxed out. That said, with Fallout aside, I am still giving this card a SOLID 4 stars, as it does pack a lot of bang for the buck, and seemed very solidly built. It's solid overclocking ability is a huge factor, as I mentioned that you can easily squeeze an additional 50 out of the GPU and 500 out of the memory without adjusting voltage or any other factors. I want to make sure I'm giving this card a fair shake too, because it didn't have any other issues, and even played Fallout perfectly on high settings, just not on ultra. On the stock fan profile, it got as hot as 72°C and averaged in the 62-68°C range most of the time. This wasn't a huge shock, as the ACX2.0 cooling "upgrade" means that the fans don't even turn on until it reaches 60°C, which seemed quite high before the fans even start turning. I felt that was too hot for my liking and made a custom (and very moderate) fan curve via MSI Afterburner, which easily dropped the max temp to 58°C and averaged 48-54°C. When the fans run at 100%, it does sound like a Harrier jet taking off, but even with my custom fan curve I rarely heard the fan reach more than 50%, which was very tolerable. In closing, this card may very well work perfectly for those of you that don't have to have the absolute best graphics on every game, and if that is you, this is definitely your card. However, if you are an ultra graphics gamer on anything released in the last year, stepping up at least 1 tier to the GTX 970 would be strongly advised. For reference, my build included: i7-4790 CPU (stock clock) G.SKILL Sniper 32GB (8GBx4) 1866mhz RAM MSI Gaming 5 Z97 mobo (2) Intel 240GB SSD (1 windows, 1 gaming) 640GB HDD (storage) Cooler Master EVO212 EVGA 750 Bronze PSU

I upgraded from a Radeon 6850 that I owned for far too long considering it was traded into me for a discount on some computer work I did. Don't laugh, so was my giant Xerox printer, Cisco switch, HP storage server and a few other items, but I digress. Paying actual money for this video card on the day that it launched was... well... weird. The purchase did make sense though - it was right in the price range I wanted to pay, it was new and fast and not likely to fall in price my 2-day shipping with Prime made it to my home, and it wasn't a smoking hot pile of Radeon driver crap. Seriously, the GeForce drivers and Experience application is pretty well written, even if it wants to update drivers more often than I am accustomed to. Add in the fact that you can use LimeLight Game Streaming (limelight-stream.com) to extend the power to other devices on your LAN - way cool. Game performance is more than adequate on 1080p. I don't even own a display capable of higher output so I can't even test if the crippled 128-bit memory bus that everyone is complaining about actually limits 2560 & 4K performance. What I can tell you is that it plays every game I have on Ultra high settings. Games like Oregeon Trail, SimCity 2000, and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter are smooth as silk on this card. I might even try Deus Ex. Seriously though, I am playing Witcher 2 right now at 1080p Ultra settings and its perfect. Especially the into scene with Triss. Occasionally drops to 38fps, but that's the lowest I've seen. It is also quieter than the last GPU I had. Fits nicely in my SilverStone Temjin TJ08-E. I was mildly disappointed that it only had 1 DVI port as I use dual DVI displays, but that was fixed by a $3 DVI-HDMI adapter - which I got in trade.

Fast card that runs pretty smooth BUT If you plan to play certain newer games on high settings I'd strongly suggest getting a 4bg ram card, even a lesser model like the 950. A game like GTA V requires 2.5gb+ of ram just to play with textures above "normal" setting, and If you are looking at getting this specific card, you probably want those extra 2gb. I really like the fans on this thing. they are nice and quiet and you don't even always need them. This thing requires much less fan power and cools much better than the last card I had which was a 9800 gtx+. I rarely put the fans above 60%. one thing I like and also dislike about the card is how the clock value is automated by the included "precision" software. It will sometimes lower the clock value when I need it fully on. Like it's supposed to run around 1400mhz on normal high, but sometimes stops at 1100mhz or 1200mhz. when idle or doing normal tasks it runs around 130mhz and uses very little power, which is nice. I was able to find a used "pristine" 4gb 960 ssc card for about the price of the 2gb version, but sadly warehouse deals sent me this 2gb but with a sticker for the 4gb on it(see pic). I realized too late that returning the 2gb would have been worth the extra cost, massive inconvenience of having no card for weeks, and having to find another cheap 4gb version. It's actually kind of suspicious considering they deal with small product difference all the time, they labeled this packed, inspected it's condition, then someone went and grabbed the box based on the box name. Maybe they grab the wrong box, sure, but what are the chances they grab the wrong box with the right label? if someone there kept track of returns they could make 60-70$ easy by buying the 4gb for the price of the unreturned 2gb, then selling the bonus face plate and card. or they just didn't want to correct their mistake and put the burden on me.

**UPDATE AT BOTTOM** 03/09/15 I bought this to install in an old G5 HP Proliant sever that I installed windows 7 on. I am using this card on a riser flex cable that I modified to install into a PCI Express gen 2 8x physical slot(Electrically it only runs at 4x) But the the 4 slow lanes that I get this card rocks, I can max out games low bandwith games like Half-Life 2 and Minecraft no problem. My problem is the high textures on games like FF14 but that is just because I am using the 4 PCIe2 lanes. This card is so quiet, the fan only turns on for a second every few minuets to cool it down by default. I changed up the fan curve to give it a more consistent cooling, not saying the default on is bad. I cannot wait to build a real computer for my girlfriend so she can actually unlock the potential of this card. **UPDATE** 03/23/15 I broke down and put together my girl a rig. AMD 8320 Black at 4.4Ghz, MSI 970 board, and this EVGA SSC 960. I got a mild overclock out of this card. 100Mhz on the cores and 150Mhz on the VRAM. Now that the card is inside a case it is dead silent. You would not know the computer was on if not for a light. For the performance, it runs most everything at around 1080p 60-90fps+. In FF14 with near max settings, its hits 45fps+ if it crowded with like 50+ other players but other than that it runs at 60+. Its funny, over 3 years ago I spend 1K on a GTX 690 and this thing is relatively half the performance at one-fifth the price. And just sips on power. I am very happy with the performance. **If you are using only one monitor and gaming at 1080p then I would recommend this card, very good price to performance.** If you are gaming at 1440p or have a multi-monitor config you should get the GTX970 for the extra VRAM, bigger bus, and performance need to run higher resolutions. I also heard they are releasing a GTX960 with a 4GB frame buffer, I would pass on that for the simple fact of the small 128 bus on this card. Not sure you would be able to utilize all of the memory as efficiently. Seems to be a money grab, if you need more VRAM get the GTX970, even if .5GB of it is slower, it is still faster than allocating that memory to system ram. VERY HAPPY!

Un plauso ad amazon per la celerissima spedizione. Ho scelto questa scheda grafica ricercando qui e la su internet, per avere buone prestazioni per il gaming in 1080p senza però dover spendere una cifra esagerata, la scheda in se mi aveva convinto già dai primi utilizzi, con giochi del tipo sym city, league of legend ( che gira a quasi 400fps, inutili, ma pur sempre ottimi per fare videomontaggi ) poi mi9 ha tolto ogni dubbio con Fallout 4 e the witcher 3, che con un aggiustatina alle impostazioni grafiche si comportano egregiamente mantenendo 60 fps anche in momenti di elevato stress per la GPU. Un altro punto nettamente a favore è la silenziosità della scheda, le cui ventole possono essere gestite dal programma Precision X , arrestandole del tutto ( il che avviene normalmente in modalità AUTO ) quando la temperatura dela scheda è al di sotto di una data temperatura. La mia scheda ad esempio porta le ventole al 30% solo dopo aver raggiunto 60° , riducendo la tempreatura significativamente in meno di un minuto, da 60° a 30° con temperatura ambiente 20° . ancora non ho avuto la gioia di provare il sistema in toto nella bella stagione estiva, ma per ora il PC gira fresco e senza problemi ( a ventole ferme per di più). Un'altra piccola cosuccia da dire è che nel disco di "installazione" della scheda trovate programmi utilissimi come nvidia Geforce experience , che ottimizzerà automaticamente (sotto previo consenso) le impostazioni grafiche di ogni gioco a cui abbiate giocato almeno una volta, presente sul vostro PC , e che inoltre vi permetterà di "Riprendere" le vostre partite il qualità Full HD direttamente da scheda video , senza cali di FPS con l'opzione shadowplay. Credo sia tutto, il prodotto è davvero buono e lo consiglio per chi ha un portafogli limitato e non vuole dover spendere 350€ per una gtx 970 o una R9 280X . la controparte di AMD per questa scheda dovrebbe essere almeno una R9 270 dual x ma a parità di prestazioni, la evga gtx960 ha dalla sua i bassi consumi ed il prezzo veramente vantagioso.

This is a very nice video card! I installed it about a week ago and so far I'm quite pleased. I had a little bit of trouble physically connecting the PSU adapter to the card but once it was connected I had no further troubles with the install. The card is well-made and doesn't feel cheap at all, visually it looks nice. In terms of gameplay, this card has been amazing. Fallout 4, which was very slow and prone to frequent crashes with my old card, autodetected the video settings to Ultra and now looks good and runs very smoothly. I was playing Dragon Age: Inquisition on low-ish graphics and while that worked well on my old card, the game looks absolutely phenomenal on max settings and also runs smoothly. I don't play FPS or online games so I can't say how it would be for those but for my needs it's perfect. Sometimes the card heats up quite a bit with graphically intensive games but that could be a fault with the lack of airflow around my PC and it really doesn't affect game performance at all. A huge plus for me is the low power requirement - I have a 480w PSU and I would've had to replace it for almost any other card in this price range. Overall I would recommend this for anybody looking for a less expensive upgrade that will be able to handle most (if not all) modern games.

This card is just GREAT. I was shocked at how quiet my system is now, especially with the fans not turning on til they actually need to. I've now had zero issue's with running any game. This card, being mid range, seems to be able to run any game i throw at it at the MAXIMUM possible settings (which is a really nice feeling) at great fps. Far Cry 4, being my most demanding and graphically beautiful game, runs at 40fps on max, which just looks great. The only game it won't run at good FPS is DayZ, which still runs at 20-30 fps, but a bit smoother than my old GT 640, probably because its DayZ. If you play Arma though (Arma 2: OA specifically) it'll run that at 60+fps, though Arma based games (arma, dayz) seem to be real fuzzy on max, no related to the card just a weird vision of 'good graphics' over at Bohemia Inc. i guess haha. If you play War Thunder, this will run the game at 70+fps. I had the game at the 'maximum'' settings, then in GeForce experience, it said ''Well... the optimal settings are Movie'' (which is more graphical improvement). Overall, this is a great card at a great price. It'll run pretty much any game at the maximum settings at a good, stable FPS (unless the game is buggy [DayZ]). It'll run all these games at 1080p too. The new Nvidia DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) is a cool feauture that lets you run games at higher resolutions and the card downsamples to your native resolution. The more demanding games, like Battlefield 4, chug along a bit at the 4K resolution, so this definitely is not a 4K gaming card, but then again, if you're 4K gaming, you're probably buying at a much higher price. Basically, great card, and they call this ''mid-range''. The Nvidia video promoting its release actually seems like an understatement for this beast. 10/10, 110/100, great card would buy again.

Je trouve que cette carte graphique a un rapport prix/performance excellent. Je ne joue pas fréquemment mais je l'utilise avec des logiciel de montage vidéo et 3d. Elle gère 2 écrans très facilement et est super silencieuse !!! Je ne suis pas convaincu de mettre plus d'argent pour un modèle supérieur ou alors faut jouer avec tout les paramètres assez hauts.

La compre para uno de mis hijos, esta claro que no es la mas potente pero cumple muy bien sus tareas moviendo todo tipo de juegos y en algunos teniendo que tocar algún tipo de parámetro en los gráficos, Muy silencioso y los acabados premium como siempre en esta Marca. Para mi la mejor gtx 960 del mercado