Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming SOC Review

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming SOC3. Architecture and Overclocking4. High Res Gallery5. Testing Methodology6. 3DMark Vantage7. 3DMark 118. 3DMark9. Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Tomb Raider (1080p and 1440p)11. Grid AutoSport (1080p and 1440p)12. Thief (1080p and 1440p)13. Metro: Last Light Redux (1080p and 1600p)14. Total War Rome II: Emperor Edition (1080p and 1600p)15. Thermal Dynamics16. Acoustics Performance17. Power Consumption18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

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 Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming is a monster solution – a dual slot, triple fan card featuring several thick heat pipes running across the length of the PCB. The image below shows the G1 Gaming beside the other card we review today, the Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition. Quite a difference in size.

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?

GPU	GeForce GTX 750ti (Maxwell)	GeForce GTX 960 (Maxwell)	Geforce GTX 970 (Maxwell)	GeForce GTX 980 (Maxwell)
Streaming Multiprocessors	5	8	13	16
CUDA Cores	640	1024	1664	2048
Base Clock	1020 mhz	1126 mhz	1050 mhz	1126 mhz
GPU Boost Clock	1085 mhz	1178 mhz	1178 mhz	1216 mhz
Total Video memory	2GB	2GB	4GB	4GB
Texel fill-rate	40.8 Gigatexels/Sec	72.1 Gigatexels/Sec	109.2 Gigatexels/Sec	144.1 Gigatexels/Sec
Memory Clock	5400 mhz	7010 mhz	7000 mhz	7000 mhz
Memory Bandwidth	86.4 GB/sec	112.16 GB/sec	224 GB/s	224 GB/sec
Bus Width	128bit	128bit	256bit	256bit
ROPs	16	32	64	64
Manufacturing Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
TDP	60 watts	120 watts	145 watts	165 watts

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. GIGABYTE have tweaked their G1 Gaming to 1,241mhz (1,304 mhz boost) with 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1,.753 mhz (7Gbps effective).


We have seen this artwork many times before – the neon style ‘eye' makes an appearance again on the GTX960 G1 Gaming box.

Gigabyte list a series of technical details on the back of the box.

Inside the box are several power converter cables, a quick guide and a software disc.

The Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming is a hefty looking graphics card. The metal shroud is heavy and the three fans command the full width of the PCB. There is a great looking backplate on the PCB too, which is branded with the ‘G1 Gaming' name.

This is a very well built card, comprised from metal.

The card ships with two DVI (DVI-D and DVI-I) connectors, 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.

Gigabyte Flex Technology (Patent pending) is incorporated into this card. The card will automatically detect any connected monitors and configure multi display gaming – up to 4 monitors at the same time.

Nvidia's reference design uses a single 6 pin power connector, but Gigabyte have adopted two on this card, potentially to help improve overclocking stability. We will take a closer look at overclocking shortly.

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


The Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming ships with three fan headers – these control fan speeds and power delivery. The base of the cooler is a direct touch implementation, with four thick heatpipes running horizontally between rows of aluminum fins on either side. It is a substantial cooler. The fans will stop spinning when the power load drops.

The Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming has a 6 Phase power design (supporting a maximum of 160 watts), while the reference board is limited to 3 phases (120 watts limit).
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 Gigabyte GTX960 Gaming G1, which is supplied in an overclocked state.

Based on the reference Nvidia specifications of 1,125mhz core and 1,750mhz memory (7Gbps effective) Gigabyte have overclocked the GM206 core by 10.3 percent to 1,241mhz. They have not touched the memory, holding it at 1,753mhz (7Gbps 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 Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming in its ‘out of box' state, and with our final maximum overclocked tweaked settings.

We managed to get the Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming SOC stable with the Boost speed peaking at 1,463mhz. Any higher than this and we noticed some artifacting and eventually hard locking. We had to increase the fan speed a little to get rock stability. Nvidia's reference boost speed is 1,178mhz so this overclock translates into a total 24.1% increase. Not too shabby.

We didn't push the memory any higher as it has a minimal impact on game performance.
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. The lower cost Asus GTX750Ti Strix OC Edition is also included as a performance indicator of the lower end sector.

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 Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming scores well in this older benchmark, just ahead of the Sapphire Dual X R9 285 and behind the XFX R9 280X DD.
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 Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming scores well in this benchmark, just behind the 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.”


Overclocking the GTX960 G1 Gaming delivers good results in this benchmark, scoring just over 8000 points.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).


At the ‘out of the box' speeds, the Sapphire Dual X R9 285 manages to just outscore the Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming. When we increase the turbo boost speed to 1,463mhz the positions are reversed.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.


Solid performance at both resolutions averaging over 60 frames per second at 1080p, and over 40fps at 1440p.
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.


Grid AutoSport's engine runs very smoothly on the Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming at 1080p, holding over 60 frames per second at all times. At 1440p the frame rates are still good, holding above 40 frames per second at all times.
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 particularly demanding engine, especially at 1440p. At 1080p, the results are perfectly playable from the GTX960.
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.


At these very high image quality settings, we are asking a lot of the hardware. At 1080p, when overclocked, the GTX960 delivers a solid experience, although ideally we would drop the image quality a little to improve minimum frame rates. 1440p proves a little much for all of the hardware on test, apart from the overclocked R9 290.
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 Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming runs well out of the box, although manually overclocking it to the limit does reap a little reward, improving minimum frame rates from 26 to 30.
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.


These are good results, although we noticed that the Asus GTX960 Strix OC Edition which we also tested today, runs noticeably cooler. We would therefore assume Gigabyte are putting more voltage through the card, but we will analyse this shortly.
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

There is no doubt that Maxwell is efficient architecture, and due to this, the fans don't have to spin that fast under load, even stopping sometimes. Noise emissions are very low, and not really noticeably louder than even the GTX750ti Strix OC under load.
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 Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming system consumes 197 watts under load. When we manually overclocked the card, the draw increased to 218 watts. This card consumes more power than the Asus GTX960 Strix OC, an indication that it is indeed drawing more power from the two 6 pin power configuration. The Nvidia reference design incorporates a single 6 pin connector.
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. The Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming is going to fit in at the top of the pricing scale.

The Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming is a big, beefy graphics card that could be visually mistaken for a flagship GTX980. Having tested so many high end cards lately, it was a nice change of pace to analyse GTX960 solutions today. If you are in the market for a new graphics card to pair up with a HDTV or 1080p panel, there are certainly no shortage of options available.

Noise levels from the three fan Windforce cooling solution are low, and when tasked with a lighter load, the fans disable completely. In reality, under most load situations you would be hard pressed to actually know the card is working hard. It is only when dealing with the more demanding Direct X 11 game engines that the fans will all activate to maintain a specific thermal curve.

As we have seen today, the GTX960 isn't redefining performance in the sub £200 sector. It delivers similar performance to an overclocked R9 285 which we tested back in September 2014. It does however significantly outperform the GTX760 and if you want to upgrade from a previous generation mid range Nvidia GPU it does make a lot of sense.

Placing a focus only on frame rate delivery is somewhat missing the point of the Maxwell architecture. The GTX960 runs much cooler and quieter than either R9 285 or GTX760 under load.

The Gigabyte GTX960 G1 Gaming is a slightly different take on the architecture when compared to the ASUS GTX960 Strix OC which we also reviewed today. Gigabyte have added an extra 6 pin power connector and increased the power demand a little to enhance overclocking stability. The G1 Gaming did moderately outperform the Asus solution when both were manually overclocked to the limit, although the caveat is that the Gigabyte card requires around 10-20 watts more under the same load situation.

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Pros:

• Maxwell architecture is very efficient.
• all metal construction.
• very quiet under load, silent when idle.
• low power consumption.
• overclocks well.

Cons:

• Isn't outperforming an overclocked AMD R9 285 at much the same price.
• Could be clocked much higher out of the box.

Kitguru says: This is a big, serious looking graphics card that is more than capable of delivering smooth frame rates at 1080p with the latest Direct X 11 games.

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