 Another day another graphics card welcome to our review of the GeForce GTX 960 Strix from Asus Nvidia's latest attempt to hit the sweet spot $200 price point with a card that delivers a great gaming experience but have they taken things to the next level like they did when they launched the 8800 GT at $200 or is the GTX 960 an uninspiring architectural refresh that will delight gamers about as much as their favorite cereal now with 20% more brand for a healthy colon something that's certainly a good thing, but just not that exciting Cooler Masters case mod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes Entries closed February 7th 2015 click now to learn more So we will have a video coming up that examines the 960s competitiveness when you run a couple of them in SLI But today's focus is on a single card config and the card will be using as a Susa Strix design one that we already Liked from the GTX 970 and 980 iterations, and we continue to like here. Why do we like it? You might ask well for a number of reasons Which I would normally explain in the context of how it compares to a reference design But GTX 960 reference designs don't really exist out in the wilds while I can really say about it Is that the card itself features a Susa's usual solid build quality with special attention to overclock ability wine reduction and Lifespan improvements and the cooler is a beefy quad heat pipe aluminum fin affair with two 75 millimeter fans And this is our favorite thing about Strix cards By the way that only need to spin when the card is under heavy load at idle It's silent and even under light loads like League of Legends at 1080p the fans do not need to spin Now it should be noted that with recent updates to third-party overclocking tools like afterburner You can do this manually now with a custom fan curve But I still think it's nice for the other 95% of people out there that Strix cards do it out of the box Now for the tour of the rest of the card as expected it features a PCIe 16x Gen 3 slot at the bottom a 6-pin PCIe power connector at the back with a handy-dandy Indicator LED to show you you've plugged it in correctly an SLI connector at the top this card supports up to two-way SLI and On the rear the standard Maxwell I o config with a dual link DVI I connector three native display port 1.3 connectors and HDMI 2.0 connector that can handle up to 4k 60 Hertz on compatible displays and support via the underlying video engine for up to 5k displays or up to quad 4k multi-stream displays Booyah not that you can expect this card to run the most demanding triple-a titles at 4k 60 FPS anyway That's kind of unreasonable But let's take a peek under the hood to get a better idea of what we can expect from the GTX 960 it features the same Maxwell architecture as the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 970 that are below and above it in the product stacks that means support for Dynamic super resolution easy super sample anti-aliasing that can be turned on in GeForce experience to get the most out of older games MFAA Nvidia is equivalent to standard multi sample anti-aliasing with a smaller performance hit that is now compatible Almost across the board with DirectX 10 and 11 titles something we did use for our testing on the basis of PC purrs excellent investigation into MFAAs visual similarity to MSAA VXGI lighting feature that I suspect this card isn't powerful enough to ever actually use in a game anyway some memory bandwidth efficiency improvements thanks to Nvidia's third generation Delta color compression and finally Enormous improvements in power consumption that Nvidia figures gives the 960 about two times the efficiency of a GTX 660 which might seem like a strange comparison on the surface I mean why was Nvidia so quick to compare 960 not to the card whose price and position? It's directly replacing on store shelves the GTX 760 But rather to the GTX 660 in their press deck well because marketing names aside It's actually a much more direct successor to that card because it features a fully fledged GM 206 Maxwell core at its heart compared to the fully fledged GK 106 Kepler in the 660 the 760 was actually a bit of an odd duck card and that it actually had a GK 104 base GPU same as the GTX 670 680 and 770 but with some additional kneecapping so that explains the step down in memory interface width from 256 bit to 128 bit something I'm sure Nvidia hopes to compensate for with higher clocks and their more efficient memory architecture, but enough of that stuff How does it actually perform well? It's fine I guess as usual we're using our 59 60x overclocked test bench with all cards overclocked to the max check the spreadsheet in the video Description for the over clocks we achieved we ran some modern AAA titles at 1080p and some more casual games at both 1080p and 4k to see how it stacks up and well it performs better than the GTX 760 while costing less both for the end user and for Nvidia and delivers much better power consumption numbers than its competition on the Red side although power consumption is not quite as important to me as you know Kind of killer features and actually one of the killer features that Nvidia has lorded over AMD for the last year Variable refresh rate gaming with G sync monitors is no longer an Nvidia only thing thanks to free sync monitor availability being right on Our doorstep right now although Nvidia still has game stream, and I still do use my shield a lot so Conclusion time who is this card for built in h265 encoding and decoding? silence and power efficiency with HDMI 2.0 output for 4k 60 Hertz displays and HDMI 2.0 TV anyone makes it sound like a great media center PC card and its solid gaming performance lands it Exactly in line with what you'd expect to get for 200 bucks and change does it light the world on fire? It's a great overclocker with our GPU reaching about a hundred megahertz above the boxes advertised boost clock without us even tweaking anything And then beyond that with some slider tuning, but beyond that no not really But then if we were expecting it to then the fault is ours for not paying attention to Nvidia strategy over the last few years And or the ever-changing 20 nanometer and 16 nanometer manufacturing process roadmaps from chip foundries like Global foundries and TSMC Nvidia was unlikely to get a better GPU likely to give us a crippled XO for class chip at this price point like they did with the 700 series Given how well those are selling at 350 to 550 dollars, so they went back to a fully enabled X06 in this case GM 206 which still manages to be very competitive Speaking of managing to be competitive Can you imagine a world where your favorite anime titles were available as little as an hour after they originally aired in Japan with? 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Streaming library of anime content on demand with shows like okay I don't even know how to pronounce that can call it a cute high earth defense club love and full seasons of shows like Naruto Shippuden well if you can then you've either got a great imagination Or you've heard of crunchyroll.com because they have all that stuff And if you want to start enjoying their service all you need to do is head over to crunchyroll.com Slash Linus and sign up you'll also get 30 days for free the longest trial period offered by any of our content streaming Sponsors and if you enjoy your 30-day trial and you want to stay subscribed you'll be paying the very reasonable price of $7.95 per month to do so so give it a try if you're into anime Thanks to crunchyroll for sponsoring this episode of Linus Tech Tips Thanks to you for watching as always check out the other link in the video description the other not the sponsor one if you Want to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one give us a monthly contribution or change your bookmark For Amazon to one with our affiliate code so whenever you buy random stuff like graphics cards We get a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe