Look at it!Īs a reviewer, though, these cards present me with a real problem: they’re too darned good. Just look at this EVGA card with an ACX 2.0 cooler. The contrast with comparable offerings from just a few short years ago is striking. All of these GTX 960 cards-from the likes of EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus-are truly excellent. The convergence of these trends is a good thing, too. Rising power efficiency is always welcome, as is more effective, quieter cooling. Beyond that, all of these coolers have a nifty, semi-passive cooling policy where the fans don’t spin up when the GPU is at idle or lightly loaded.īoth of these trends are good ones. Twin fans are the norm, and one of these cards has triple fans on an extra-long cooler. They’ve added more copper, more heatpipes, and more heatsink area. Meanwhile, the video card makers have all been hard at work refining their coolers to evacuate lots of heat with very little noise. The result is a chip that doesn’t consume much more power than the old GeForce GTX 660 while offering tremendously more performance. You see, with its Maxwell architecture, Nvidia has sought to make its GPUs much more power-efficient than in the past. Part of the problem has to do with the nature of the GeForce GTX 960 and the video cards based on it. What am I supposed to make of this bunch? Seems simple, right? Yet as I sit here and attempt to pull together this article, I’m struggling to make it work. I then resolved to do a follow-up article to look at the individual cards in more detail, along with some overclocking attempts. I tested their power draw and noise levels, and I compared their performance. Part of the problem is that I already looked at these five different flavors of the GeForce GTX 960 in my initial review of the GPU. I can’t seem to get my head around how to approach it. Yet my attempt to cover a bunch of GeForce GTX 960 cards has left me flummoxed. What I’m saying is that I should have the basics of this gig down pretty well by now. I’ve reviewed a lot of stuff, and a big chunk of that stuff has been video cards. I’ve been reviewing PC components since the dawn of human history, or least since the last century, which is pretty much forever in Internet time. I hate to brag, but I kinda know what I’m doing here.
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