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(Specifically the ones that still use the Chicago Motherboard) because the card is incompatible with their very outdated bios.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.

This is Nvidia attempting (and succeeding) to beat out AMD/ATI before the rollout of their new cards. This is also a very efficient card, doesn't use near as much power as the recent popular ATI cards have been. I have my GTX 960 SSC paired with 8gb DDR3 RAM and an AMD 8350 and this combo on 3dMark scores better than 68% of the results online, which is really good considering most people using 3dMark spend way more than $1k on their machines. I also have the EVGA Backplate to cover this card, and I think that is part of the reason I can run several games without even needing to turn on my fans via Precision X16 fan control. There are better CPU's and better GPU's but you will pay at least $320 for the better versions of each. Whether you get this EVGA SSC version of the 960 or the Asus version both cards were meant to run virtually any game currently on the market at a smooth 60fps (the speed required for good vsync) with high/max settings. This has held fairly true in my experience so far. Far Cry 4 hammered my 550Ti and on low settings it would dip to noticeable choppy framerates below 30fps. Now I run it on high (not ultra) settings way beyond 60fps with vsync off and a few other options like the Fur option in that game that hammers even SLI rigs. Battlefield 4 set to max settings no problem, the benchmark option while on the test range showed 70+fps. Just Cause 2 set to max settings it runs without vsync right at 60fps with a few 1-3fps dips when lots of explosions hit the screen. Supreme Commander Forged Alliance max settings there is no slowdown of any kind even with lots of action on the screen. All of the Stalker games with their respective Complete mods that enhance in-game graphics have the maximum graphics setting and the 2nd best lighting option since the DX10 lighting option just doesn't seem coded well. The games that would hit my old GPU the hardest are now set to max or just 1 or 2 options short of max setting and running above 60fps in general. The rest either don't even heat up the GPU to even bother with the fan or run way over 100fps. Overall I'm very happy, I feel this card will be good for at least 3-4 years before it starts sagging too much in brand new graphics-loaded games. Don't bother with the 4gb versions of the card, minimal gains and that extra $40-$50 would be better used going to a GTX 970. Don't forget the EVGA backplate, it adds $20 or 10% more cost to the card but it looks much better, slows down how quick the card gets hotter, and reinforces the board from warping/bending over time by sitting horizontally in a traditional PC tower with gravity pulling it downward. Totally worth it.

Update #1: After the launch of GTX 950, the GTX 960 line-up looks like a big joke from NVIDIA. When I compare the performance/price ratio, I can't help but wonder what the heck is this line-up even for. If you were to look at GeForce's performance comparison in their website, there's a huge gap between GTX 960 and GTX 970, and such a tiny gap between GTX 950 and GTX 960. Feel cheated? Yes. Disappointed in NVIDIA? Yes. Disappointed in this product? No. This heavily-factory-overclocked-out-of-the-box hardware could handle itself just fine in the competition. Not gonna complain about EVGA; they just do what they do best, creating a beast of a hardware. DEFINITELY gonna complain about NVIDIA & their stupid scheme nowadays. Original Review: When NVIDIA brought the Maxwell architecture to the table with GeForce GTX 750 / 750 Ti, they defined the new standard of efficient with low powered graphics card, resulting in lower temperature for better overclocking and the extra "oomph" in your gaming experience. Now, with the second generation of Maxwell architecture, the word efficient has become an understatement. And partnering with EVGA, they created beastly cards while maintaining the beauty of the technology. I own the GTX 960 SSC ACX 2.0+ 2GB graphics card and, while it's considered an entry level card, it could deliver a satisfactory gaming experience in 1080p for me. Now, I don't really aim for "4K Ultra" settings and I wouldn't expect this card to perform to that extent, because this is meant for 1080p gaming. Know what to expect when buying a piece of techie so that you wouldn't go ape-crazy because it couldn't deliver to your expectation. I know that people are saying "2 GB ain't worth nothing" and that this card is just a waste of money compared to what the Red Team has to offer, but EVGA has made a pretty sweet deal here. This card is by far the highest clocked GTX 960 in the market (stock), and partnering it with the ACX 2.0+ cooling, the temperature under load is really sweet. Plus there's the dual BIOS setup for 0 dB gaming experience. Meaning, the fans wouldn't start spinning till the card hit 60 degree C (you could change it to the standard, always spinning, fan mode just by a flick of a switch). Not forgetting the PrecisionX and all its utilities. One of the utilities is the frame rate cap which I find it really useful as the card don't have to over-exert its own strength to produce more than your desired fps, although the card is most able to (my monitor is a 60 Hz monitor, so 60 fps is the sweet spot). Again, this result in less noise as the fans spin slower, temperature is lower, and that gives us more headroom for overclocking for more demanding games. I'm on a low budget build here, thus buying the 2 GB version could easily save me $20-$50. If you're still not convinced, there's the 4 GB version (although benchmark shows little improvement over the 2 GB one, but maybe one day it could be fully utilised with newer drivers) and the "FTW" version, which is their top-tier product. All in all, I'm really happy with this purchase. I would recommend you guys to do so. P.S. I'm not supporting NVIDIA with all their proprietary bullcrap here. That's not good for us gamers. I'm only praising the performance this card could bring with that amount of money spent

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.

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.

**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!

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.

So far so good. Replaced my old GTX 560 with this. Easy install. I mainly play BF4 and my FPS increased to 60-70 in ultra settings at 1680 x 1050 (need a new monitor). It comes over clocked but I used the Precision software to increase the clock to 1440 with a 6 volt increase. Looking at some over clock tutorials and reviews, people have hit over 1500 mHz at 12 volts stable, but Im new to OC'ing so I went a little lighter. Im also running this on a slighter older mobo and processor, the AMD phenomII 965 black 3.4. Love how quiet the fans are and the low power consumption. Im sure with some core hardware updating I could push this card harder and it would beg for more. EDIT: So I have been using this now since Feb. Since then, I upgraded my mobo (Gigabyte GA-78LMT and RAM (just because)). The card has been eating up anything I throw at it without an issue or crash. So much so, that I sometimes have to turn the detail down because there is too much to look at. I overclocked it at 5% using the Precision software and left the stock voltage. I didn't see any reason to go higher. Recently installed BF4 Hardline and though the game itself is awful, the graphics are great. Of course everything on high-ultra. I can't say enough about this card at this price point. The only thing i might do is grab the backplate for the little bit of passive cooling it offers. For 20 bucks, why not?

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 the first EVGA product I have purchased and I have been very impressed. The build quality is exceptional, it feels very sturdy and high quality. EVGA tout on the box that they are the #1 seller in the US and UK for Nvidia cards and that the card has 3 years of their award winning customer service and warranty. You can purchase an additional 2 year extension for €12 (£8) so you can cover this card for up to 5 years! Amazon have confirmed that they will provide a 1 year warranty themselves and you must contact EVGA after that period. This was very important for me as my XFX 7950 died 3 months out of warranty (XFX only offer 2 years). "128 bit bus? 2GB VRAM? Half the specs of a 970? This card is awful!" - I have seen that written numerous times whilst looking at online reviews, and on paper it might be true. The spec-sheet paints this card in a bad light but that simply is not the case. This card performs incredibly well, much better than my XFX 7950. At stock speeds at 1080p in World of Warcraft you can max it out on Ultra with AA at 60+ FPS, In Grand Theft Auto 5 I am getting 50-60 on High textures and a mix between High/Very high settings. Yes you can get similar FPS on the 7950 but i did encounter more FPS drops on that than this card. There is one massive difference between this and the AMD card, and that is the noise level. This card is 100% silent! My case fans are now louder than this card! The fans will not turn on unless it hits 70ºC but in use it hovers around 55-60ºC. You may think this is a pointless feature but it makes using my PC a more enjoyable, Since you don't have to hear a jet engine in your computer for hours on end. The fans stay off whilst playing WoW and ran at 12% during GTA5. In contrast my 7950 ran hot at 80ºC and the fans sped up to 3500 RPM to keep it from overheating. In addition it made my other components run 20ºC cooler since its no longer blowing hot air into the case. I personally think that this card is extremely well thought out and well engineered, at half the specs of the 7950 it out performs it in games whilst drawing 1/2 the power and generating no noise at all. Nvidia also offer additional features such as ShadowPlay recording, GeForce Experience, Physx, TXAA, MFAA, DSR, GameStream, G-Sync, CUDA, etc. Another thing to note is that Nvidia offered new stable drivers the day before GTA5 released whilst AMD simply offered a beta driver, the last stable driver was 10.3 Omega back in December 2014. I apologise if this review sounds like a fanboy wrote it but this was simply my experience from moving from a 7950 to 960, take it with a grain of salt and please don't attack me in the comments, I don't care about this Nvidia vs AMD flamewar. Conclusion In my opinion I think that anyone buying this card would be very pleased with it. This card runs basically silent, offers great performance, and paired with Nvidia feature offering and EVGAs support you have a complete package. The Silent operation is my favourite feature, You won’t want to go back to a loud card in the future. Pros: Silent operation Low power consumption Great frame rates Very cool Long warranty coverage Overclocking headroom Cons: Know its’ limits - Not recommended for anything higher than 1080p.

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

Davvero ottimo prezzo per questa eccellente scheda grafica, la consiglio perchè anche non essendo ormai recentissima..è pur sempre una GTX960...tra l'altro questa è la versione SSC (Super Clocked) quindi potenziata diciamo. Con questa scheda grafica mi partono tutti i giochi a risoluzione massima e con settaggi davvero elevati, più che soddisfatto! Consiglio!