The card

Gigabyte decided to equip their new GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming with the latest version of their own cooler, which is called WindForce 3X 300W. It features four 6mm copper heatpipes. Soldered to the heatpipes, there is a large and dense fin stack which is being cooled by three 80mm fans. 

Overall the cooler is well built and compared to the predecessor the copper base plate is more even that what it looked like on the GTX 760. Nevertheless the number of heatpipes has been reduced by one. Meanwhile also Gigabyte implemented a feature that makes the fans turn off as long as there is low load on the GPU. If the temperature drops below 43°C or GPUs power consumption is lower than 32W the fans are deactivated. If the GPU hits 62°C or if the power consumption of the chips is higher than 60 Watts, then the fans are there for active cooling. Another closer look at the cooler reveals that there is a large coper plate, which helps distributing heat evenly to the numerous heatpipes. Sticking to the copper plate we find thermal pads, which are touching the memory chips and VRM area.



The Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 960  graphics card, or to be precise our sample of it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'550 MHz for the GPU and 2'050 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D benchmark with 15 minutes duration and 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme With these clocks we had to feed the GPU with 1.25 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages.



A closer look at the PCB shows that Gigabyte equipped its card with an 6+1 phase power design. The GPU gets its current from six phases (NCP81174) and on additional phase (NCP5239) is there to handle the memory.



The memory chips on the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 960 come from Samsung and carry the model number K4G41325FC-HC28. They are specified to run at 1'750 MHz (7000 MHz effective). 

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 13 - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Page 2 - The card	Page 14 - Thief
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 15 - GRID Autosport
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 16 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 17 - Metro Last Light
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 18 - Assassin's Creed Unity
Page 7 - Borderlands - The Pre-Sequel	Page 19 - Far Cry 4
Page 8 - BattleField 4	Page 20 - Power Consumption
Page 9 - Watch Dogs	Page 21 - Temperatures / Noise Levels
Page 10 - Tomb Raider	Page 22 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 11 - Sniper Elite 3	Page 23 - Prices
Page 12 - Crysis 3	Page 24 - Conclusion