So, there's a lot to like about this card, but it's in this awkward place in the GTX 9xx family.
The Good:
First of all, it's ASUS. If you haven't been keeping up with the nerdy-computer-guts market in the past five years or so, ASUS decided to stop crapping out sub-par laptops, and actually make some seriously good quality components. Nowadays, almost anything with ASUS on it has some serious love built into it, and though they're high-performance, the price tags tend to be fairly reasonable. ASUS GPUs also come with monitoring and on-the-fly profiling software that, while a little buggy on Win 8/10, is pretty nifty.
I'm also surprised how cool this particular card stays. Right now, this card's in a air-cooled mid-tower, and still, after about 90 minutes of stress-testing, I can't seem to push my card past 60C. And since the oversized fans are dynamic, at idle or low load, you can barely hear the card at all. Same goes for the wattage requirements. I was a little worried before I upgraded my PSU, but the old PSU seems just content with it. Even when I play something with some serious requirements for a few hours, I'm not getting any heat or power spikes.
The Bad:
Overclocking. Just... no. Keep it at recommended voltage, and less than %110 clock. Only one time I tried to benchmark the card at redline, and it was dropping frames like an art gallery in an earthquake. Eventually, the PC froze, and I had to hard reset. The small performance boost from OVing or OCing makes it pointless from all the HW errors. It wasn't from the heat, either. The entire time, I manually set the fans to full speed, and it never crept past 50C. It just doesn't like it.
The Ugly:
For %90 of the games in my library, the card runs like a champ. I was playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, and for the lulz, I turned off VSync and removed the FPS cap. It ran for about 60 seconds and then crashed. After some investigating, I found out it was trying to run the game at >1000 fps. Awesome.
But then there's there's the other %10. I tried to play GTA V on max settings, and it's just struggling to keep >30 fps. Same deal with MSG V. Running the Unigine Valley benchmark at max with the card's default, and I'm lucky if I can average 30. I was getting spikes at 40, and min was something like 12. I have to really tone down the textures and the anitaliasing to get >60 frames.
I also got the 2GB version to save a little money. 2GB is just not enough. It's like putting a V12 supercharged engine on a go-kart transmission.
This is what I mean by "awkward". It's a little too overpowered if you're playing some casual games or an MMO. It's a little too underpowered to play something more demanding at max settings. That puts the 960 in this weird no man's land. If you want something to play LOL or TF2 with, save some money and go with an older 780. If you're trying to build a monster, shell out the extra $100 and get a 970 or 980 if you're not planning to SLI.
Bottom Line:
By no means can I call this a "bad" card. It's an ungraceful card. Most of the time, it'll outperform what I throw at it, but every once in a while, I have to go back and fiddle with the settings. I don't say I regret buying it, but I should have at least gotten the 4GB, and I think I can live with it until I decide to do an upgrade in the near future.
| Max Screen Resolution | 4096 x 2160 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 7200 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Nvidia GeForce |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 2 GB |
