Asus STRIX GeForce GTX 960 DirectCU II review

Nvidia’s 900-series GPU range has been sorely in need of a mid-range graphics card champion; the £300 GTX 970 is overkill for anyone gaming at 1,920×1,080, while the Kepler-based GTX 760 is power-hungry and beginning to show its age in the latest titles. Enter the GTX 960 – a mid-range card that shouldn’t break the bank or slam your electricity bill, yet will cope with 2015’s new releases in Full HD.

Based on the same highly efficient Maxwell architecture as the top-end GTX 980, the 960 has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 120W and only needs a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector. Effectively, anyone upgrading from a GTX 660 or similar won’t need to upgrade their power supply to use the new card. According to Nvidia, the reference card is so efficient that playing less intensive games, even when running at 1080p, should only produce around 30W of heat – meaning the card’s fans won’t need to spin up at all.

The GTX 960 uses a brand new GM206 GPU with 1,024 CUDA cores running at 1,127MHz. When thermal limits allow, that clock can boost up to 1,178MHz. Shared L1 cache has been increased and redistributed, which means each CUDA core should deliver around 1.4x the performance of a Kepler core, at 2x the performance per watt.

The GPU is paired with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM via a 128-bit memory bus. This may seem like the memory will be starved of bandwidth, but because the GM206 GPU uses fewer bytes per frame compared to the previous generation Kepler GPUs it should use that bandwidth more effectively. In real world terms it will be ample for playing most games at 1080p; it’s only when increasing resolutions beyond Full HD that memory bandwidth truly becomes an issue, which is reflected in our benchmark results further into this review.

The GTX 960 is fully compatible with the upcoming DirectX 12 API and OpenGL 4.4 standards, so it won’t be immediately out of date when Windows 10 arrives later in the year. The card also has support for multi-frame sampled anti-aliasing (MFAA) and Nvidia’s dynamic super resolution (DSR) technology.

MFAA anti-aliasing uses the Maxwell hardware to provide high quality AA without the performance hit associated with other techniques, while DSR renders games at a higher resolution than your monitor can support, before scaling the graphics down to the native resolution; this should improve visual quality and make games more detailed, although the performance hit is more severe than when using anti-aliasing.

The GM206 GPU also has native H.265/HEVC encoding and decoding, meaning it will be able to play 4K content – as soon as such content arrives in any meaningful form or quantity.

The GTX 960 is designed primarily for anyone that hasn’t upgraded their graphics card in the past two or three years, and is looking to play games at 1080p. Based on the specifications it should be able to handle most games, but for benchmark results head over to page 3.

SOFTWARE

As with other 900-series GPUs, the GTX 960 includes the GeForce Experience software suite, which optimizes graphics settings for supported games to ensure you’re getting the best possible frame rate and/or visual fidelity. It’s a one-button process, saving you from diving into menus and experimenting with settings, although it edges on the side of caution with anti-aliasing to ensure frame rates are smooth.

It also supports GameStream, for playing games remotely on an Nvidia Shield or Shield Tablet, ShadowPlay for recording gameplay ready to stream online or upload to social networks, and automatic driver downloads for hassle-free gaming.

Unlike previous 900-series GPUs, Nvidia hasn’t supplied us with a reference GTX 960 for review; instead, the company is encouraging its board partners to come up with their own heatsink and fan designs rather than rely on a reference cooler. While this makes it difficult to find a baseline card on which to judge performance, it does give us an opportunity to see what manufacturers are doing to set their cards apart from the competition.

We started with the Asus STRIX GTX 960 DirectCU II, which uses an open four heatpipe, twin fan heatsink cooler design to blow hot air back into the case, rather than vent it directly out the back. It’s still very effective, however, keeping the GPU at around 38 degrees when idle and below 70 degrees after a long gaming session.

As the GTX 960 produces so little heat, the heatsink is able to keep it cool without needing the fan when working on the desktop or playing less-demanding games like League of Legends and DOTA 2, or strategy titles like StarCraft II. Once the GPU hits 65 degrees, the twin fans will spin up to keep it cool, but they never became loud enough to notice over the other fans in our test system.

For the most part, the STRIX is completely silent, but after an hour’s gaming the fans had to spin up to keep the GPU cool. Even so, it was very difficult to hear the card over the volume of our test PC’s CPU cooler and case fans. If you’re looking to build a quiet gaming PC for the living room, this strikes an excellent balance between performance and silence.

The card is less than 9in long and although it occupies two PCI Express slots, it’s small enough to fit comfortably in a small form factor PC. This, combined with the incredibly quiet fans, makes the STRIX ideal for gaming HTPC builds as well as larger desktops. As with the reference design, it only requires a single 6-pin PCI-Express connector.

A single HDMI 2.0 and three DisplayPort 1.2 ports on the back of the card will all support 4K displays at 60fps, which will definitely stretch the GTX 960’s gaming abilities but won’t be an issue for multi-screen desktop setups.  There’s also a single DVI connection for 1,440p resolution or 21:9 aspect ratio displays.

OVERCLOCKING

Asus bundles its GPU Tweak software with the STRIX, which gives you full control over GPU and memory clocks as well as fan speed. Dive into the settings menu and you can enable voltage control as well. The software suite monitors temperatures, power draw and GPU usage so you can see what effects your changes are having on the card.

Using GPU Tweak we increased the GPU clock to the software’s safe maximum 1,469MHz and increased memory clocks to 7,910MHz, which added 3-4fps to our Metro Last Light benchmark (see below). Disabling the safe maximums didn’t result in a higher overclock without increasing GPU voltage, as pushing the card further introduced visual artifacts and crashes.

With our maximum overclocks in place, temperatures hovered around 75 degrees after 30 minutes of gaming. The fans were still incredibly quiet, although they had to spin constantly in order to keep the GPU at an optimal temperature.

Nvidia might suggest reference GPU and memory clocks of 1,126MHz and 7,010MHz, but you’ll be hard-pushed to find a card running at those speeds on launch day. Asus has overclocked the STRIX out of the box, with the GPU running at 1,291MHz and the memory boosted to 7,200MHz. In GPU Tweak’s OC mode, the GPU boost clock will hit 1,317MHz, which should result in a 10% performance increase over the reference GTX 960, although we performed all our tests at the card’s stock clock speeds unless otherwise stated.

Starting with our least demanding game, Dirt Showdown, the STRIX proved how capable the 960 GPU is at 1080p gaming; an average frame rate of 132fps with all settings on High and 4x anti-aliasing is incredibly smooth. Dirt is a few years old now, but is incredibly scalable – so much so that the frame rate only dropped to 122.4fps when we boosted the resolution to 2,560×1,440.

4K gaming was possible too, scoring a still perfectly smooth 68.7fps. We had to up the quality to Ultra and anti-aliasing to 8x at 4K resolution before the frame rate dropped below the magic 30fps barrier, but even then 29.7fps is still just about playable without gameplay becoming too stuttery. Moving on to newer titles revealed the GTX 960’s limits, however.

2013’s Tomb Raider reboot doesn’t require serious power to run on sensible quality settings, but with tesselation and SSAA anti-aliasing enabled the game can still tax mid-range cards at 1080p. Here, the STRIX managed 38.3fps – still perfectly playable, but we’d suggest switching to less demanding FXAA anti-aliasing. This boosted frame rates to a much smoother 82fps.

Upping the resolution to 2,560×1,440 resulted in a jerky 22.3fps with SSAA, but it was more than playable at 50.4fps with FXAA enabled instead. 4K was all but unplayable with SSAA enabled, at 13.2fps, and even switching to FXAA couldn’t produce a smooth frame rate, with the card managing just 22.8fps at these settings.

Metro: Last Light Redux, meanwhile, is a seriously good looking game that demands powerful hardware to get playable frame rates. We turn everything up to max, meaning SSAA anti-aliasing, 16x antistropic filtering and tesselation set to Very High, but the STRIX still managed 30.4fps at 1080p. Higher resolutions were out of the question with such high quality settings, however; 2560×1,440 dived to 16.8fps and 4K fell even further to 7.2fps.

Clearly 1080p is perfectly achievable on the GTX 960, but you’ll have to be realistic with anti-aliasing and detail levels if you plan on going to 2,560×1,440 or beyond. 4K gamers will definitely want to spend more on a graphics card in order to keep playing the latest titles.

In terms of price and performance, Nvidia’s latest mid-range card sits comfortably at the bottom of the 900-series line-up. The GTX 970 costs around £100 more, and while its 4GB of GDDR5 RAM and wider memory bandwidth make it ideal for 2,560×1,440 gaming, it’s overkill if you’re planning on sticking to 1080p for the foreseeable future. As the company has yet to introduce any entry-level 900-series GPUs, the only cheaper Maxwell-powered choice is the GTX 750ti, which this new card comfortably outperforms.

With a £190 RRP, the Asus STRIX GTX 960 DirectCU II is just about cheap enough to be called mid-range. GTX 960 boards from other manufacturers should cost between £160 and £200 depending on their cooling and stock speeds, which slightly undercuts AMD’s rival Radeon R9 285. We were impressed with the Asus card’s silent running, which makes it ideal for SFF and HTPC builds, and the moderate out-of-the-box overclock helps improve frame rates slightly, but it remains to be seen whether other manufacturers will push the GPU even further at the expense of noise.

The GTX 960’s real competition is the Radeon R9 280; the R9 280’s frame rates are only slightly lower at 1080p, yet thanks to its larger 384-bit memory bus and 3GB of GDDR5 memory, it should survive the bump to 2,560×1,440. AMD’s card is also available for around £150. The R9 280 is effectively a rebranded HD 7950, however. The two generations-old card has a 200W TDP and needs two PCI-Express connectors, making it more power hungry and unsuitable for compact HTPC builds.

If you’re after a power efficient, quiet card that can still handle modern 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second, the GTX 960 will fit the bill.