Testing Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 960 2GB Graphics Cards In SLI

Introduction Here at eTeknix, we strive to give the consumer the best possible advice in every aspect of technology. Today is no different, as we have 2 GeForce GTX 960's ready for some testing. The first is the Asus STRIX GeForce GTX 960 (check out our review of that here) and the second is the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 (check out our review of that here). When striving for the best results, it is favourable to test 2 of the same models to allow for no variation in any clock speeds or variations in any integrated components. Fortunately, as these cards are both non-reference, we have some headroom for overclocking, which is sometimes not present in reference models. In their dedicated reviews, you can see that both of these graphics cards are more than capable of running most feature games and benchmarking software at playable levels at 1440p. When tested at 4K resolution, both of these cards struggled and failed to wow us, so it will be interesting to see how these cards stack up against their single scores. This setup might be the favourable choice for some, as it is more budget friendly than splashing the cash on a pair of GTX 970's or GTX 980's, so let's find out if it's worth it! We inserted both GTX 960 graphics cards onto our Core i7 5820K and X99-based test system, ensuring adequate spacing and that both have access to sufficient PCI-e bandwidth for SLI operation. Due to both of these graphics cards having ample cooling capabilities in their own right, position isn't really an issue. In this test, we have placed the Gigabyte G1 Gaming graphics card in the traditional 'Hot Spot' due to its far more substantial cooling solution. As we saw in the dedicated reviews, thermal throttling isn't an issue here. In fact, both of these cards have a passive running feature which allows for passive running under 65°c. It will be very interesting to see if these cards can run passively together, possibly even while playing slightly more demanding games. Both of the graphics cards we have here are non-reference, they have a higher base clock as standard compared to a reference design card. We will have to match these cards clock speeds of both core and memory to try to closely match them and to give the best results. Test Systems and Procedures Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to overview our test system. Test System Motherboard - Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WiFi LGA 2011-3 Motherboard Processor - Intel Core i7 5820K at Stock 3.3GHz RAM - 8GB (2 X 4GB) Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz CPU Cooler - Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Power Supply - Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W Main Storage Drive - Crucial M550 512GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Displays - U2868PQU 4K Operating System - Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit Driver Details Hardware Used "Killawatt” style electricity usage meter wall plug Decibel meter Games Used Batman Arkham Origins Battlefield 4 Bioshock Infinite Hitman Absolution Metro Last Light Tomb Raider Benchmarks Used 3DMark Unigine Valley Other Software Used Unigine Heaven CPU-ID HWMonitor TechPowerUp GPU-Z Luxmark 3DMark "The new 3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware. With three all new tests you can bench everything from smartphones and tablets, to notebooks and home PCs, to the latest high-end, multi-GPU gaming desktops. And it's not just for Windows. With 3DMark you can compare your scores with Android and iOS devices too. It's the most powerful and flexible 3DMark we've ever created." From Futuremark.com The figures are what to be expected, near 90% scaling at 1080p and 1440p. Sadly the 2GB VRAM limitation holds the cards back at 4K, presenting minimal gains over a single card. Batman: Arkham Origins "Batman: Arkham Origins is a 2013 action-adventure video game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montréal and released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 video game consoles. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it follows the 2011 video game Batman: Arkham City and is the third main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. The game, played from a third-person perspective, focuses on Batman's combat and stealth abilities, detective skills, and gadgets for combat and exploration. Arkham Origins is the first game in the series with multiplayer capability." From Wikipedia. Batman Arkham Origins scales well, around 65%, which seems the average for SLI configurations and that's good news for the 960. Battlefield 4 "Battlefield 4 is coming to PC, powered by the advanced technology of DICE’s proprietary Frostbite 3 engine. Blur the line between game and glory in Battlefield 4. With dynamic destructable environments, vehicular combat, and the chaos of all-out-war with 64 players, Battlefield 4 on PC will be an unmatched interactive experience. In addition to its hallmark multiplayer, Battlefield 4 features an intense, dramatic character-driven campaign that starts with the evacuation of American VIPs from Shanghai and follows your squad's struggle to find its way home. There is no comparison. Immerse yourself in the glorious chaos of all-out war, found only in Battlefield." From Battlefield.com Battlefield 4 revealed near-perfect scaling, even presenting the best score at 1440p. Bioshock Infinite "BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter like you’ve never seen. Just ask the judges from E3 2011, where the Irrational Games title won over 85 editorial awards, including the Game Critics Awards’ Best of Show. Set in 1912, players assume the role of former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, sent to the flying city of Columbia on a rescue mission. His target? Elizabeth, imprisoned since childhood. During their daring escape, Booker and Elizabeth form a powerful bond -- one that lets Booker augment his own abilities with her world-altering control over the environment. Together, they fight from high-speed Sky-Lines, in the streets and houses of Columbia, on giant zeppelins, and in the clouds, all while learning to harness an expanding arsenal of weapons and abilities, and immersing players in a story that is not only steeped in profound thrills and surprises, but also invests its characters with what Game Informer called “An amazing experience from beginning to end." From Bioshockinfinite.com Bioshock often presents the worst scaling results, but here we see again near perfect scaling throughout; exceptional results at 1440p especially. Hitman Absolution "Hitman: Absolution is the fifth title in the Hitman series by producer, IO Interactive, published by Square Enix and co-published by Eidos. The game was released for thePlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows on November 20, 2012. Hitman: Absolution runs on IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier 2 game engine, combining classic Hitman game mechanics with new mechanics." From hitman.wikia.com Hitman Absolution scaled very well, again around the 90% mark. Not bad for an AMD optimised game. Very playable at 1080p and acceptable at 1440p. Metro Last Light "Metro: Last Light (formerly Metro 2034) is a first-person shooter and horror video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was released in May 2013. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features a mixture of action-oriented and stealth gameplay. The game exists in the universe of the novel, Metro 2033, and its sequels, written by Russian author, Dmitry Glukhovsky, but does not follow any direct storylines from the books. Metro:Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the canonical ending from the novel, ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones.Metro: Last Light features technology which boasts of lighting effects and improved physics claimed to set a new graphical benchmark on the PC and consoles." From Wikipedia.org Metro Last Light is nothing short of a GPU destroyer. The GTX 960 hit a 68FPS average at 1440p, so it should be a nice option for a budget crossfire setup. Tomb Raider "On 5 March 2013, Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise. In Tomb Raider, the player is confronted with a much younger Lara Croft who is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain." From Wikipedia.org Tomb Raider favours the green team, showing very good scaling throughout testing. 47FPS at 4k resolution; this is very impressive for 2GB VRAM. Unigine Valley "Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user." From Unigine.com. Unigine is a GeForce-friendly test so I am not surprised to see scaling is near 100% in this test. It's amazing how much difference adding another card can make, although it does highlight the lack of VRAM at 4K. Luxmark (OpenCL Compute) LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmark tool. The idea for the program was conceived in 2009 by Jean-Francois ‘Jromang’ Romang. The idea was quite simple, wrap SLG inside an easy to use graphical user interface and use it as a benchmark for OpenCL. From LuxRender.net. Here I'm astounded with the result, over 100% scaling. May have been an exceptional test for the SLI setup, but even scaling 100%, you would only lose around 100 points. Noise Levels The noise levels produced by a graphics card is an increasingly important consideration for PC users and Gamers these days. While fan noise is unlikely to ruin the gaming experience, no one likes a noisy graphics card and no one will argue with the fact that quieter is better. Many users are willing to sacrifice temperatures to gain a silence advantage, but with better cooling solutions being developed it is increasingly common to be able to get both better cooling and better acoustic performance than a reference solution on most custom cooled graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD partners. That said both AMD and Nvidia have stepped up their game too with regards to acoustics on their reference coolers. Ultimately, acoustics will always be a big deciding factor when there is often very little differentiation between graphics cards using the same GPUs. To acquire the noise levels of graphics cards in our benchmarks we run three different load scenarios for 5 minutes and take an acoustic reading using our decibel meter at the end of those load scenarios. The measurement is taken approximately 30cm horizontally away from the graphics card and the CPU fan is disabled and other background noise minimised to reduce interference. The three load scenarios are desktop idle, Furmark load and Unigine Heaven load. The reading in Unigine Heaven is always taken in the first scene of the sequence after one loop is completed. Our earlier predictions have been proven correct, even in SLI, these can run passively at idle and general use. Even when under benchmark stress there was a mere 1 decibel increase over the single card configuration. Power Consumption With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of three different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. Power consumption is impressive for an SLI configuration; ~100% more performance for ~50% more power, very impressive indeed. Temperatures The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when choosing a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are extremely important. Lower temperatures are always better and with AMD and Nvidia opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account it is important that graphics card vendors use high performance cooling solutions in order to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching dangerous temperatures are now in the past but the importance of lower temperatures still remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds .We take temperature readings after 5 minutes of three different load scenarios: desktop idle, Furmark load and Unigine Heaven load. We always record actual temperatures and make a note of the ambient. In the case where more than 1 GPU is used an average is created. Normally we would dismiss an SLI configuration at the bottom of a testing graph. This graph however, is different. Despite using more power and having two cards running, temperatures are astounding. Not only are they the lowest at idle, they are the lowest under stress. Those aftermarket cooling solutions and the low power Maxwell architecture are really shining through. This also allows us to disprove a possible error in the testing of the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 960, the Heaven temperatures were in the mid 70°c's, here we can see that the temperatures were around 59°c. Final Thoughts Multi-GPU systems seemed to have gained a negative reputation in the past for bugs, glitches and a lack of performance scaling. I myself have never experienced any similar issues unless one of the cards was faulty. Today the tests have proven immense scaling at 1080p and 1440p, with at least 85% performance increase, and I didn't notice any glitches or bugs throughout. I really liked the SLI performance of the GTX 960 range, as shown with these 2 cards which have been pretty amazing overall. Near 100% scaling in most of the tests and some very playable FPS scores at 1080p and 1440p throughout. Here I'm torn, the price point of these cards is around $199, which is very good for those on a tighter budget. They're very capable at lower resolutions, but I feel that the 2GB of VRAM is holding these cards back at 4K, the performance drop at 4K compared to 1440p is massive. I believe an extra 1GB would really liven up these cards and prove a fantastic budget gaming solution for 4K resolutions. The results speak for themselves, compared to a single GTX 960 graphics card, the performance gain would be silly to ignore, but choosing SLI relies on more factors than that. Generally only those on a tighter budget would choose to SLI two mid range cards. It's typical to buy the first card brand new and purchase the second card once it's available on the second-hand market. Looking at the figures, two GTX 960's would cost $398 current MSRP, where a single GTX 970 would cost $329 MSRP, that's 21% more expensive and only 13% performance gain. When these do start cropping up on the second-hand market, the second card would need to be priced around $150 to be worth considering this configuration. I would recommend this SLI setup solely on the fact that these can run passively at idle and during general usage, perfect for those with a HTPC with 2 accessible PCI-e slots, silent for movies and packing more than enough grunt for gaming. How long before we see some higher-powered, premium graphics cards come on the scene with the same claim to fame? only time will tell. Pros Amazingly quiet and cool for an SLI setup Outstanding performance and scaling Energy efficient Cons Lacking at 4k resolution Poor SLI performance/ cost ratio compared to a single GTX 970 option "Perfect for the average gamer with a typical 1080p or 1440p monitor setup. The ability to give exceptional performance at these resolutions while staying cool and quiet is a great deal in my books." Thank you to Asus and Gigabyte for providing these review samples.