Nvidia GTX760 Graphics Card Review

Rating: 9.0.

One of Nvidia's greatest success stories in recent years has been their GTX 660 ti. This discrete solution targeted the high end enthusiast gamer – hitting a sweet spot between £200 and £250. Put two GTX660 Ti's in SLi and you had a configuration able to battle head to head against the flagship GTX Titan, at half the price. It was not a shock to find out they have been widely adopted by discerning gamers who want the most bang for their buck. Today we look at Nvidia's replacement for this much loved solution, the GTX760.

The new Nvidia GTX760 is built on the 28nm process and ships with 6 SMX units, providing 1152 CUDA cores. The memory subsystem consists of four 64 bit memory controllers (256 bit) with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory onboard.

Unfortunately we were unable to get any retail GTX760 cards in time for launch today but Nvidia sent us one of their reference samples which will feature at the heart of our review.

The base clock speed of the GTX760 is 980mhz with a typical boost speed set at 1,033mhz. The memory clock speed is set at 1,500mhz, or 6Gbps effective. We would expect many of Nvidia's partners to ship with custom coolers and enhanced clock speeds, especially if our overclocking results today are anything to go by.

This review will feature the GTX760 against some of the leading solutions available today. Nvidia informed us before publication that a standard reference GTX760 will hit a £210 inc vat price point. This would mean that overclocked custom solutions are likely to retail around £230-£240 inc vat. As we would expect this is much the same price zone as current GTX 660 ti models.

To make it more interesting AMD have been actively stoking the fire behind the scenes forcing recent price drops in the same price zone. A handful of HD7950 models are now available for around £220 inc vat, such as the MSI HD7950 OC model. The popular HD7870 Tahiti LE can be picked up now for as little as £165 inc vat.

To cover all bases we will be throwing in comparisons against a Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X, a VTX3D HD7870 Tahiti LE, an MSI GTX670 Power Edition, an eVGA GTX660 Ti SC, and an Asus Direct CU II OC GTX 660. All cards on test today are running the latest drivers from AMD and Nvidia (Catalyst 13.6 Beta and Forceware 320.39 respectively).

As most of these solutions are overclocked and we were unable to get hold of an enhanced partner card for launch we felt it was important to break with tradition and overclock our GTX760 sample at the start of the article and include these results in the findings. This should give a good early representation of the fastest GTX 760 solutions that Nvidia partners will be selling in the retail channel over the coming weeks.

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