Gtx 960 g1 gaming review: Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming 2 GB Review

GIGABYTE GTX 960 G1 Gaming Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone
 Comments
📅22-01-15

Introduction

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.

21 pages

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2

3

4

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Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: SpecificationPage 3: GTX 960 FeaturesPage 4: DSR & MFAAPage 5: Packaging & AccessoriesPage 6: First LookPage 7: Closer LookPage 8: Test Setup & MethodologyPage 9: Temperature, Acoustics and Power ConsumptionPage 10: OverclockingPage 11: Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike (Synthetic)Page 12: Unigine: Heaven 4 (Synthetic)Page 13: Unigine: Valley (Synthetic)Page 14: Battlefield 4 (FPS)Page 15: Watchdogs (Action/Adventure)Page 16: Thief (Stealth)Page 17: Company of Heroes 2 (RTS)Page 18: Metro: Last Light (FPS)Page 19: GRID: 2 (Arcade Sim)Page 20: Overall PerformancePage 21: Conclusion

Review and testing of the video card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming

Contents

• Introduction
• Review Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming
• Appearance and dimensions
• PCB
• Cooling system
• Test stand
• Instrumentation and Test Method
• Cooling System Potential Study
• Cooling System Performance Summary
• Overclocking: theory
• Electricity consumption level
• Results Metro: Last Light
• Details
• Conclusion

Introduction

Thinking about the right way to start reviewing another video card, I decided to look at everything from the other side. It is worth assessing the progress by bringing together in one table all the GPUs released in the last couple of years.

One of the vendors is making desperate attempts to modify the successful GCN architecture, but somehow all enthusiasm dissipates after the release of a single core. The second company, on the contrary, is constantly developing in small but very effective steps, moving in the right direction. That is why AMD’s market share is falling while Nvidia’s is growing.

Although, frankly speaking, we haven’t seen much progress for a long time. The only thing the Californian company won was in reducing the power consumption of its graphics solutions. As a result, you no longer need to keep two large families of GPUs, because Maxwell allows you to make microcircuits for the discrete video card and laptop market.

Let’s move on to the next creation of Nvidia — GM206-300, presented this time by the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming (GV-N960G1 Gaming-2GD).

Review Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming

Appearance and dimensions

А – printed circuit board length, excluding cooling system and video output port bracket.
B PCB width, excluding PCI-E pins and cooling system.
C — height from the horizontal plane of the printed circuit board to the level of the upper surface of the cooling system.
D – diameter of the fan/s along the outer radius.

A1 – length of the printed circuit board, including the cooling system (if it extends beyond the printed circuit board) to the bracket for the video output ports.
В1 — width of the printed circuit board, excluding PCI-E pins, but including the measurement of the cooling system (if it extends beyond the printed circuit board).
C1 — height, taking into account the back plate (if any) or radiator mounting screws to the level of the upper surface of the cooling system. If it is lower than the height of the back plate of the video output ports, then the height is measured to the top point of the bar.

Video cards from Gigabyte, unlike other similar models, are equipped with one not superfluous DVI port. The total number of video outputs has been increased to six. You can use five at the same time, but with one feature.

Yes, you can connect multiple displays to a regular GeForce GTX 960 using three DisplayPorts and one DVI. Basically, a multi-monitor configuration makes sense when a group of multiple high-resolution displays (more than 2560 x 1440) is created. In this case, the HDMI port disappears, and the Gigabyte GTX 960 has exactly the same number of useful video outputs as on versions with a reference set of ports.

It might be possible to work around this by using two full DVI ports, but you lose a DisplayPort pair with this option. So in the case of the hero of the review, an extended set of ports is a certain compromise.

PCB

No new and original ideas, since the GM206 is quite an economical GPU. Unless, to ensure the high frequency of its operation, the engineers resorted to installing as many as six power phases.

In reality, the power system consists of three phases, which are wired in parallel through doublers. They are located on the back side.

Magic coils are designed to finally overcome the disease of extraneous squeak at partial load on the GPU. Judging by further tests, Gigabyte developers managed to find a solution to this issue. G1 Gaming is the first graphics card that does not emit a squeak under load.

The memory power is traditionally placed at the end of the PCB. Otherwise, there are no LED power indicators, ways to bypass protection, and so on.

The sadder, because two 6pin connectors are used for work. This provides enough total power to overclock to any level. It remains to check what the engineers have done with the BIOS, and how they met all Nvidia’s requirements for restrictions.

PWM controller for all GeForce GTX 960 one is NCP81174. It also works with a couple of other Maxwell based GPUs: GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980.

Four memory chips manufactured by Samsung soldered on the front and back. They are designed for frequencies up to 1750 MHz (effective frequency 7000 MHz), the bus width is 128 bits.

Maxwell graphics core released at the end of 2014. The nominal frequencies of the video card are 1241 MHz for the GPU (GPU Boost up to 1304 MHz) and 1750 MHz for the memory. In reality, the declared frequency numbers almost never match.

A little bit about ASIC Quality

By popular demand, here is an allegedly «quality» assessment of the GPU by the GPU-Z program.

Later on, you will realize that ASIC Quality evaluates a parameter that is far from being responsible for the dependence of the overclocking ratio and the supplied voltage on the GPU. The real quality is measured after the final assembly of the video core, when the crystal is placed on a textolite substrate and current is passed through the contacts. The general principle of evaluation is the same, but each developer uses his own unique ways and does not want to share them with competitors. After all, the faster you check the mass of processors, the lower the production costs.

The question is, how many GPUs are discarded in the final testing process? Not much, because the bulk of the marriage has already been sifted out during the production of the crystal itself and it remains only to set the marking of the rated voltage for it. The table for the GeForce GTX 960 is unified, it can be viewed in the BIOS of the video card. Theoretically, the worse the processor, the higher the rated current should be, but this is not always the case. There are many separately powered units inside the graphics core: some are quite simple and operate in a wide voltage range, while others, on the contrary, are complex and function only under certain conditions.

For example, TMU and FP64 Cuda cores are large, they take up a fair amount of area. Accordingly, they need to be “correctly” fed? No, another mistake, one of the most power-demanding blocks is the task manager! If the entire GPU works stably at 1.0 V, but the controller fails at 1.1 V, then the nominal voltage according to the table is increased by one step. Let’s say at 1.125 V the video core becomes problem-free, and GPU-Z compares VID 1.125 with a common base and gives ASIC Quality only 60%. In reality, such a GPU can be overclocked even better than the one whose ASIC is higher. After all, the TMU block will be the faulty section.

Therefore, ASIC performance should be taken with skepticism. In fact, there are many other nuances in assessing the quality of a GPU. But, alas, the signed NDA does not allow sharing them with the audience.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming

Top specifications and features

• Passmark score
• 3DMark Fire Strike Score
• 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics test score
• 3DMark Ice Storm GPU benchmark score
• 3DMark Vantage Performance test score

Passmark

test score Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming:
5867
Best score:
30117

Performance

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming:
2007
Best score:

Memory

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming:
563
Best score:

General Information

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming:
1577
Best score:

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming features:
100
Best score:

Description

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming graphics card based on Maxwell architecture has 2940 million transistors, tech. process 28 nm. The frequency of the graphics core is 1241 MHz. In terms of memory, 4 GB is installed here. DDR5, clocked at 1753 MHz and with a maximum throughput of 112.2 Gb/s. Texture size is 79.4 GTexels/s. FLOPS is 2.47.

In tests, the video card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming showed itself as follows — according to the Passmark benchmark, the model scored 5867 points. At the same time, the maximum number of points for today is 260261 points. According to the 3DMark benchmark, the video card scored 7696 points out of 49575 possible.
Directx Version — 12.

In terms of compatibility, the video card is connected via the PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. Regarding cooling, the heat dissipation requirements here are 120 watts.
In our tests, the video card scores 1763511 points.

Why Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming is better than others

No merits

• Passmark score 5867 . This parameter is lower than 49% of products
• 3DMark Fire Strike Score 6512 . This parameter is lower than 41% of products
• Test score 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics 7696 . This parameter is lower than 42% of products
• 3DMark Ice Storm GPU test score 302206 . This parameter is lower than that of 36% of goods
• 3DMark Vantage Performance score 29895 . This parameter is lower than 35% of products
• 3DMark Cloud Gate GPU test score 48529 . This parameter is lower than 40% of products
• 3DMark 11 Performance GPU score 10469 . This parameter is lower than 39% of products
• Unigine Heaven 4.0 test score 842 . This parameter is lower than that of 13% of goods

Review Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming

Performance

Memory

general information

Functions

Ports

Tests in benchmarks

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming Review: Highlights

GPU base clock

The graphics processing unit (GPU) has a high clock speed.

1241MHz

max 2457

Average: 1124. 9 MHz

2457MHz

GPU memory frequency

This is an important aspect calculating memory bandwidth

1753MHz

max 16000

Average: 1468 MHz

16000MHz

FLOPS

A measure of the processing power of a processor is called FLOPS.

2.47TFLOPS

max 1142.32

Average: 53 TFLOPS

1142.32TFLOPS

RAM

Graphics card RAM (also known as video memory or VRAM) is a special type of memory used by a graphics card to store graphics data. It serves as a temporary buffer for textures, shaders, geometry, and other graphics resources that are needed to display images on the screen. More RAM allows the graphics card to work with more data and handle more complex graphic scenes with high resolution and detail.
Show all

4 GB

max 128

Average: 4.6 GB

128GB

Number of PCIe lanes

The number of PCIe lanes in graphics cards determines the speed and bandwidth of data transfer between the graphics card and other computer components through the PCIe interface. The more PCIe lanes a video card has, the more bandwidth and ability to communicate with other computer components.
Show all

16

Mean value:

L1 cache size

L1 cache size in video cards is usually small and is measured in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB). It is designed to temporarily store the most active and frequently used data and instructions, allowing the graphics card to access them faster and reduce delays in graphics operations.
Show all

48

Mean value:

Pixel rendering speed

The higher the pixel rendering speed, the smoother and more realistic the display of graphics and the movement of objects on the screen will be.
Show all

39.7 GTexel/s

max 563

Average: 94.3Gtexel/s

563 GTexel/s

TMUs

Responsible for texturing objects in 3D graphics. TMU provides textures to the surfaces of objects, which gives them a realistic look and detail. The number of TMUs in a video card determines its ability to process textures. The more TMUs, the more textures can be processed at the same time, which contributes to better texturing of objects and increases the realism of graphics.
Show all

64

max 880

Average: 140.1

880

ROPs

Responsible for the final processing of pixels and their display on the screen. ROPs perform various operations on pixels, such as blending colors, applying transparency, and writing to the framebuffer. The number of ROPs in a video card affects its ability to process and display graphics. The more ROPs, the more pixels and image fragments can be processed and displayed on the screen at the same time. A higher number of ROPs generally results in faster and more efficient graphics rendering and better performance in games and graphics applications.
Show all

32

max 256

Average: 56.8

256

Number of shading blocks

The number of shader blocks in video cards refers to the number of parallel processors that perform computational operations in the GPU. The more shader units in the video card, the more computing resources are available for processing graphics tasks.
Show all

1024

max 17408

Mean value:

17408

L2 cache size

Used to temporarily store data and instructions used by the graphics card when performing graphics calculations. A larger L2 cache allows the graphics card to store more data and instructions, which helps speed up the processing of graphics operations.
Show all

1024

Mean value:

Turbo GPU

If the speed of the GPU drops below its limit, it can switch to a high clock speed to improve performance.
Show all

1304MHz

max 2903

Average: 1514 MHz

2903MHz

Texture size

A certain number of textured pixels are displayed on the screen every second.
Show all

79.4 GTexels/s

max 756.8

Average: 145. 4 GTexels/s

756.8 GTexels/s

Architecture name

Maxwell

GPU name

GM206

Memory bandwidth

This is the speed at which the device stores or reads information.

112.2GB/s

max 2656

Average: 257.8 GB/s

2656GB/s

Effective memory speed

The effective memory clock speed is calculated from the size and information transfer rate of the memory. The performance of the device in applications depends on the clock frequency. The higher it is, the better.
Show all

7012MHz

max 19500

Average: 6984.5 MHz

19500MHz

RAM

Video card random access memory (also known as video memory or VRAM) is a special type of memory used by a video card to store graphics data. It serves as a temporary buffer for textures, shaders, geometry, and other graphics resources that are needed to display images on the screen. More RAM allows the graphics card to work with more data and handle more complex graphic scenes with high resolution and detail.
Show all

4 GB

max 128

Average: 4.6 GB

128GB

GDDR Memory Versions

Latest GDDR memory versions provide high data transfer rates to improve overall performance
Show all

5

Mean: 4.9

6

Memory bus width

A wide memory bus indicates that it can transfer more information in one cycle. This property affects the performance of the memory as well as the overall performance of the device’s graphics card.
Show all

128bit

max 8192

Average: 283.9bit

8192bit

Die size

The physical dimensions of the chip that houses the transistors, microcircuits, and other components necessary for the operation of the video card. The larger the die size, the more space the GPU takes up on the video card. Larger die sizes can provide more computing resources, such as CUDA cores or tensor cores, which can lead to increased performance and graphics processing capabilities.
Show all

228

max 826

Average: 356.7

826

Generation

A new generation of graphics card usually includes improved architecture, higher performance, more efficient use of power, improved graphics capabilities and new features.

GeForce 900

Manufacturer

TSMC

Thermal Dissipation (TDP)

The heat dissipation requirement (TDP) is the maximum amount of energy that can be dissipated by the cooling system. The lower the TDP, the less power will be consumed.
Show all

120W

Average value: 160 W

2W

Manufacturing process

The small size of the semiconductor means it is a new generation chip.

28 nm

Average: 34.7 nm

4 nm

Number of transistors

The higher their number, the more processor power it indicates

2940 million

max 80000

Average: 7150 million

80000 million

PCIe version

Considerable speed is provided for the expansion card used to connect the computer to peripherals. The updated versions have impressive throughput and provide high performance.
Show all

3

Average: 3

4

Width

298mm

max 421.7

Average: 192.1mm

421.7 mm

Height

115mm

max 620

Average: 89.6mm

620 mm

Destination

Desktop

OpenGL version

OpenGL provides access to the graphics card’s hardware capabilities for displaying 2D and 3D graphics objects. New versions of OpenGL may include support for new graphical effects, performance optimizations, bug fixes, and other improvements.
Show all

4.5

Mean value:

DirectX

Used in demanding games providing enhanced graphics

12

max 12.2

Mean: 11.4

12.2

Shader model version

The higher the shader model version in the video card, the more functions and options are available for programming graphic effects.
Show all

6.4

max 6.7

Average: 5.9

6.7

Vulkan Version

A higher Vulkan version usually means a larger set of features, optimizations, and improvements that software developers can use to create faster and more realistic graphical applications and games.
Show all

1.3

max 1.3

Mean value:

1.3

CUDA version

Enables the use of graphics card compute cores for parallel computing, which can be useful in areas such as scientific research, deep learning, image processing, and other computationally intensive tasks.
Show all

5.2

max 9.0

Mean value:

9.0

Has HDMI output

HDMI output allows you to connect devices with HDMI or mini-HDMI ports. They can transmit video and audio to the display.
Show all

Yes

DisplayPort

Allows you to connect to a display using DisplayPort

3

Average: 2. 2

4

DVI outputs

Allows connection to a display using DVI

2

Mean: 1.4

3

Number of HDMI connectors

Show all

1

Average: 1.1

3

Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

HDMI

A digital interface that is used to transmit high definition audio and video signals.
Full text

Yes

Passmark test score

The Passmark Video Card Test is a program for measuring and comparing graphics system performance. It conducts various tests and calculations to evaluate the speed and performance of a graphics card in various areas.
Show all

5867

max 30117

Average: 7628.6

30117

3DMark Cloud Gate benchmark score GPU

48529

max 196940

Average: 80042.3

196940

3DMark Fire Strike Score

6512

max 39424

Average: 12463

39424

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics 9 test score0302