NOTE: I'm a software developer and I am reviewing this card for productivity use, particularly its support of up to 4 monitors. I use 5 monitors on my main development machine which is the machine I am using this card with.
I finally decided to dump my troublesome & buggy dual AMD 7850 cards for one of these cards. Finally I am free of all the AMD driver bugs - like with mouse pointers, system crashes, weird graphic problems, problems coming out of monitor sleep, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. I always hoped AMD would resolve the issues in their next driver update, but it was like they would fix one issue and another issue would emerge, or a bug they seemed to have fixed before would come back in a newer driver release... it was extremely frustrating and I will probably never buy an AMD graphics card again, or at least for the foreseeable future.
This 960 card runs up to 4 monitors and has 2 DVI connectors which I why I bought it. Two of my monitors are 2560x1600 dual-link DVI and this card handles them in addition to 2 more 1920x1080 monitors. I did have a problem at first using the wrong card outputs. It must be some limitation on which outputs you can use at one time and unfortunately that limitation did not seem well documented. Fortunately I figured it out and switch to using the two dual-link DVI ports, the HDMI port, and the DisplayLink port next to the HDMI port. When using those ports all 4 monitors were recognized.
I find the card to be pretty quiet. Gigabyte's OC GURU II says the fan runs at 40% during normal use of my development machine (on auto mode). When I manually set the fan speed to 100% it got noticeable louder but the fans should not normally run at that speed. I considered the 3-fan version of this card for a little more $$$ but I thought that card was a bit long and that could be an issue either now or in the future if I want to use the card in a smaller case... plus this card was in stock at the time and the other card wasn't. If you want the quietest card (or want to overclock more) and have the space in your case for the 3-fan version of this Gigabyte card, then I would recommend the 3-fan version, but this card is very quiet (but not silent).
Oh, for the 5th monitor, I use this USB display adapter which works great:
iClever USB 3.0 to DVI / VGA / HDMI Adapter / Converter for Multiple Monitors / Displays up to 2048 x 1152 / 1920 x 1200 Each (Displaylink DL3500 Chipset) - Laptop, Desktop, LCD, TV and Projector Applicable
So the bottom line is that I'm very happy to have gotten rid of TWO buggy AMD cards and replaced it with ONE of these cards and a USB adapter display. Power usage is probably significantly down as well since I went from two cards to one card and this card is suppose to be one of the most power efficient available right now.
The only card you need if you are gaming @ 1080p
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2015
I am amazed at how powerful this card is. I was originally going to buy a 970 but I see now that it would have been overkill. I plan on replacing this card in about 2 years to get ready for VR, so I decided to go with a cheaper card that I could put in my wife's machine.This card handles every game I have thrown at it. For example, Battlefield 4 @ 1080p on ultra settings has an average of 90fps. It doesn't even get hot enough to spin it's fans with Skyrim. I do not see the point of buying a card beyond the 960 if all you are doing is gaming on a 1080p screen. Seeing that higher end cards cannot do 4k or VR displays well, I wouldn't buy them.For reference here is my build: http://pcpartpicker.com/b/CLLD4D
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2015
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