Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition Review

Rating: 8.5.

It was almost a year ago when Nvidia released their first graphics card based on the Maxwell architecture. My reviews of the GTX750Ti were positive – Maxwell delivered excellent full HD performance while taking all the power it needed direct from the PCIe slot. I said back in February 2014 that future high end Nvidia GPU's would likely lead the way – and as the year came to a close I was proved correct. The GTX970 and GTX980 won multiple awards on KitGuru. Nvidia's Maxwell architecture also walked away with our Excellence in Technology Award for 2014. 2015 is a new year and with the GTX960 being released this week, can Nvidia possibly do it again?

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC is a diminutive solution, a dual slot, dual fan card featuring several thick heat pipes running across the length of the PCB. Compared to the monster Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming, which we also review today, it really is tiny (see picture directly below).

Nvidia say the GTX960 is one of the most power efficient high performance gaming cards, and with a quoted TDP of 120 watts it seems in line with what we would expect from the Maxwell architecture. The GTX960 will surely appeal to a wide audience – on paper it should be noticeably more powerful than the GTX750ti, while shipping below the £200 ‘sweet spot'.

How does the technology behind the GTX960 stack up?

Nvidia's GTX960 GM206 ships with 1,024 CUDA cores – significantly more than the 640 CUDA cores available on the GTX750ti, but half the amount featured on the flagship GTX980 (2,048).

A bone of contention within the enthusiast audience will be the somewhat limited 128bit memory interface – identical to the GTX750ti. Nvidia are keen to point out however that the Maxwell memory architecture is approximately 33% more efficient than Kepler. We do delve into this a little deeper on the architecture page later in the review.

The reference clock speeds are set at 1,126mhz (1,178mhz boost), with 32 ROPs and 64 texture units. ASUS have tweaked their STRIX OC Edition to 1,253mhz (1,317 mhz boost) with 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1800mhz (7.2Gbps effective).


The scary looking STRIX OWL features on the Asus GTX960 box – taking up most of the real estate. A little image of the Direct CU II cooler is visible in the corner.

Many of the technical details are highlighted on the rear of the box.

Inside the box is some setup literature and a video adapter connector.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition is an attractive little card. Dual fans take up much of the cooler space, with red stickers highlighted in the center. A backplate covers the rear of the card's PCB, and we can see that part of the cooler actually overhangs the PCB, which is very small.

The build quality of the card is high and the thick heatpipes are visible running along the length of the PCB under the cooler.

The card ships with a single dual link DVI connector, three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI connector. This HDMI port will handle 4K resolutions at up to 60hz. These are all full sized ports which is much better than having to rely on mini converter cables.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition takes power from a single 6 pin power connector, adhering to Nvidia's reference design.

This solution is SLi capable, with one connector available for dual card configurations.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC ships with Samsung GDDR5 onboard. A single connector on the PCB controls both fans. The cooler is a direct touch design with four thick heatpipes cooling the core, and running into aluminum fins on both sides.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition incorporates a 5 phase ‘Super Alloy' power delivery system with super alloy chokes to decrease buzzing noise. The company are also using Super Alloy Capacitors which they claim increase the lifespan by 2.5x.
The new GTX960 incorporates Nvidia's GM206 GPU. The GM206 features all the primary architectural innovations we discussed when the GTX980 launched last year.  The Maxwell GPU uses a new SM design that has been designed to enhance efficiency.

The Maxwell SMM is partitioned into four 32 CUDA core processing blocks (128 CUDA cores per SM), and each of these has its own dedicated resources for instruction buffering and scheduling. Nvidia's design is based around keeping the GPU CUDA cores fully utilised more often to improve workload efficiency, and to reduce wasted power.

Each of the GM206 SMM units have their own 96kb shared memory, and the L1/texturing caching functions are combined into a 24kb pool of memory per pair of processing blocks (48kb per SMM). Previous Kepler GPU's had a smaller 64kb shared memory function which was also shared as a L1 cache.

Nvidia have calculated that each GM206 CUDA core can deliver 1.4 more performance per core compared to the GM106 Kepler core, with a 2x performance ratio per watt.

While many will negatively focus on the 128 bit memory interface of the new GTX960, Nvidia have added a new memory compression engine.

This third generation colour compression engine offers new modes for colour related compression which will have a positive impact on how the GPU effectively uses available memory bandwidth. Nvidia say that the GM206 uses approximately 25% fewer bytes per frame compared to previous generation Kepler products. Nvidia claim that the 128 bit, 7Gbps memory interface in GM206 is able to provide more bandwidth than its direct predecessor, the GK106. (148.8GB/sec effective in GTX 960 vs 144.2GB/sec in GTX 660).

The GTX960 will support resolutions up to 5k with up to four simultaneous displays, and support for up to four 4k MST displays. The card also fully supports HDMI 2.0.

While the GTX750ti seems an ideal partner for a media center build, Nvidia also claim in their literature that the GTX960 is a good choice for the same task. The GM206 has support for H.265 (HEVC) encoding and decoding. The GTX980 NVENC video engine offers native support for H.265 encode only, no decode. GM206 also fully supports HDCP 2.2 content protection over HDMI.

We never received an Nvidia ‘reference' sample today, and in this review we are focusing on the Asus GTX960 Strix which is supplied in an overclocked state.

Based on the reference Nvidia specifications of 1,125mhz (core) and 1,750mhz memory (7Gbps effective) Asus have overclocked the GM206 core by 11.3 percent to 1,253mhz. They have even tweaked the memory by 50mhz, to 1,800mhz (7.2Gbps effective). The rest of the hardware we have already discussed on the opening page of this review. The GM206 is built on the 28nm process and it has 32 ROPS, 64 texture units and 1,024 CUDA cores. The 2GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 128bit memory interface.

As the majority of our readers are likely to buy a GTX960 to run in a highly overclocked state, we felt we would break with tradition and get the overclocking section out of the way, first. Throughout this review we will run all tests with the Asus GTX960 Strix OC in its ‘out of box' state, and with our final maximum overclocked tweaked settings.


Nvidia's documentation indicates that engineering sample boards they tested were able to hit 1,450mhz (or more) with ease, and all with no fan speed or voltage modifications necessary. Sadly we didn't find it that easy to achieve stability at these speeds. I spent a full day with our review sample and had to settle on a final boost speed of 1,413mhz. Anything higher caused artifacting or hard locking.

We didn't push the memory any higher as it has a minimal impact on game performance.

To be fair to ASUS, they have already overclocked the GM206 core by 11.3%, so our additional 7.7% translates into a total of 19% extra over the reference design.
On this page we present some high resolution images of the product taken with a Fuji XT1 camera. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.





For the review today we are using the latest Nvidia 347.25 drivers which were supplied with the GTX960 cards by Nvidia themselves. We retested all Nvidia hardware with these drivers for this review, to keep things on a completely even footing.  The AMD cards were all retested in the last week with the latest Catalyst OMEGA 14.12 driver.

It took 12 hours a day for close to a week and over 900 benchmark runs to get the results we share today. Ideally we would have liked to include a few more game tests and put more graphic cards into the mix, but time was against us.

If you want to read more about our test system, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page. We are using an Asus PB287Q monitor for this review today.

We test all the hardware today at high image quality settings and with anti aliasing when possible. Years ago gamers would have to make sacrifices to get smooth frame rates at 1080p – but it is 2015 and we all expect very high image quality even from these ‘mid range' boards. We include higher cost cards such as the R9 290 and GTX770 to get an idea of performance positioning in the market.

Comparison cards:
Asus R9 290 Direct CU II OC (1000 mhz core / 1,260 mhz memory)
Gigabyte GTX770 OC (1,137mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)
Sapphire Dual X R9 285 (965 mhz core / 1,400 mhz memory)
XFX R9 280X DD (1,000 mhz core / 1,500 mhz memory)
Asus Direct CU II GTX 760 OC (1,006mhz core / 1,502mhz memory)
Asus GTX750TI Strix OC Edition (1,124mhz core / 1,350mhz memory)

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
Grid AutoSport
Tomb Raider
Metro Last Light Redux
Thief 2014
Total War Rome 2: Emperor Edition

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Game descriptions edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.


The Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition scores just ahead of the Sapphire Dual X R9 285, with 33,717 points – and scaled to 35,230 points when manually overclocked.
3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.


The newer 3dMark 11 benchmark shows fairly positive results for the Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition. Again the card outscores the Sapphire Dual X R9 285 and XFX R9 280X DD, falling in behind the Gigabyte GTX770 OC.
3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.

Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.

To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”


The latest 3DMark shows a slight edge for the XFX R9 280X DD solution, which outscores the Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition. After manually overclocking the ASUS GTX960 Strix OC, the differences are negligible. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We set Quality to ‘Ultra', Tessellation to ‘Normal', Anti Aliasing to 4 times and the resolution to 1920×1080 (1080p).


The XFX R9 280X DD averages 52 frames per second, around 7 more than the Asus GTX960 Strix OC, at the ‘out of the box' speeds. Manually overclocking the Asus card reduces the difference, but not enough to catch up.Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. (Wikipedia).

We test at both 1080p and 1440p with the ULTIMATE quality image profile enabled.


The Asus GTX960 Strix OC can handle both resolutions, although 1080p is a more enjoyable overall experience – the frame rate holds above 40 at all times. At 1440p this drops to around 30 frames per second.
Grid Autosport (styled as GRID Autosport) is a racing video game by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008′s Race Driver: Grid and 2013′s Grid 2. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on June 24, 2014. (Wikipedia).

We test at both 1080p and 1440p, with the game engines ‘ULTRA' image quality profile and  with 8 times Anti Aliasing enabled.


The game is perfectly playable at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions. 1080p is especially noteworthy because the Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition holds a constant frame rate above 60 at all times. If you dont mind 30 frames per second then the GTX750 TI Strix OC is still a good, inexpensive option.
Thief is set in a dark fantasy world inspired by Victorian, gothic, and steampunk aesthetics. Garrett, a master thief who has been away from his hometown for a long time, returns to it, a place known only as The City, and finds it ruled with an iron grip by a tyrant called The Baron. While The City is ravaged by a plague, the rich continue to live in isolation and good fortune while the poor are forming numerous mobs against the authorities, Garrett intends to use the volatile situation to his favor. (Wikipedia).



Thief is a very demanding engine and 1440p proves to much for most of the hardware on test today. The Asus GTX960 Strix OC delivers good results at 1080p however, averaging over 50 frames per second.

On May 22, 2014, a Redux version of Metro Last Light was announced. It was released on August 26, 2014 in North America and August 29, 2014 in Europe for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Redux adds all the DLC and graphical improvements. A compilation package, titled Metro Redux, was released at the same time which includes Last Light and 2033. (Wikipedia). We test with following settings: quality high, SSAA on, 16AF, Tessellation normal.


One of the most demanding engines on the market today with the image quality settings cranked. At 1080p, the Asus GTX960 Strix OC needs to be overclocked to the limit to hold a frame rate of 25+ at all times. At 1440p, only the R9 290 can hold it together, and even then its borderline playable.
Total War: ROME II Emperor Edition. Emperor Edition collects together all free content to date, which includes wide-ranging revisions, additions to game features and adds a brand new Campaign Pack expansion, ‘Imperator Augustus’.

We test the game at 1080p with the image quality settings at the maximum – ‘EXTREME'. Unless we drop image quality settings noticeably, this game needs more powerful hardware to run smoothly at 1440p.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC manages to hold smooth frame rates (above 25fps) throughout this test, although ideally if you want a solid 30fps+ you would need to pay a little extra money for a more powerful solution such as the GTX770OC, or R9 290.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 23c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.


The Maxwell architecture shines in this test. It is extremely efficient and a significant improvement over the last generation. When gaming, the GM206 core on the ASUS card holds steady at 53c. This rises to 60c when tasked with the purely synthetic Furmark stress test. The only card to run cooler is the Asus GTX750Ti Strix OC, another Nvidia Maxwell card.
We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

Maxwell is efficient architecture, and this has a positive impact on noise. Cooler running hardware means the fans don't have to spin as fast to maintain specific thresholds. Slower fans means less noise.
We normally test power demand direct from the VGA card input, with our Keithley Integra unit. Today however we decided to go with a more traditional approach – measuring system wide load, minus the monitor. The system we are using for this review today is detailed HERE.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition system takes 190 watts at the socket. This is a 43 watt drop from the same system featuring the overclocked GTX760. This is one of the main strengths of the Maxwell architecture – incredibly low power consumption.
Nvidia's mid range GTX960 has been some time coming – almost a year after Maxwell was introduced with the GTX750ti. The GTX960 specifically targets the gaming audience with a budget restriction of £200. For many this is the gaming ‘sweet spot'.

Pricing information started to reach us on Wednesday and Nvidia confirmed that reference grade GTX960 solutions will be sold around the £159.99 inc vat mark in the UK. They didn't send us a sample of a reference card, placing the focus on custom, third party partner solutions.

According to Nvidia prices of custom partner cards in the UK will vary between £159.99 and £189.99- and this ASUS card is right at the high end of the pricing scale.

The Asus GTX960 Strix OC is a graphics card that I enjoyed testing. After spending so much time recently with high powered £500+ solutions, it was refreshing to get back into the ‘real world' by taking a look at an affordable, quiet running GPU. While the technical data shows slightly higher noise emissions over the GTX750Ti Strix OC, in reality you would be hard pressed to hear either … even when playing games such as Tomb Raider at 1080p, with image quality settings dialed to the limit. It is worth mentioning that under lighter gaming loads the dual fans deactivate completely.

Those gamers looking for a monumental jump forward in frame rate performance are likely to be disappointed. The Asus GTX960 Strix OC is pretty much a match for the Sapphire Dual X R9 285, a card we analysed back in September 2014. That said, there is no doubt the GTX960 is noticeably faster than the last gen GTX760. If you are an Nvidia fan and want to upgrade then it is certainly a good move forward.

We do feel the need to point out that purely focusing on frame rate prowess is really only part of the overall picture, as the new GTX960 consumes around 40-45 watts less than a R9 285 or GTX760, while running much cooler and quieter.

As I don't have a reference GTX960 on hand, it is difficult to analyse how much ASUS have pushed the design forward. All things considered, I would be happy using the Asus GTX960 Strix OC in my own gaming system attached to a large HDTV.

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Pros:

• Maxwell architecture is very efficient.
• Very well built.
• very quiet under load, silent when idle.
• low power consumption.
• overclocks quite well.

Cons:

• Comparable frame rate performance to an overclocked R9 285.

Kitguru says: Competitively priced, cool running and almost silent, the Asus GTX960 Strix OC comes highly recommended.

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