Five GeForce GTX 960 cards overclocked @ The Tech Report
I had this article in the news inbox for about a month now wondering if I should post it with some comments or hit the /dev/null button and be done with it. As you can see I decided to give it some love and see what some people thought of the conclusions.
What I'm saying is that I should have the basics of this gig down pretty well by now. One would think.
Yet my attempt to cover a bunch of GeForce GTX 960 cards has left me flummoxed. I can't seem to get my head around how to approach it. Part of the problem is that I already looked at these five different flavors of the GeForce GTX 960 in my initial review of the GPU. I tested their power draw and noise levels, and I compared their performance. I then resolved to do a follow-up article to look at the individual cards in more detail, along with some overclocking attempts.
Seems simple, right? Yet as I sit here and attempt to pull together this article, I'm struggling to make it work.
Basically the article was about Scott's quest to figure out what GTX 960 was the best and figured that overclocking would be the best way. As many of you know low end GPUs often are sold factory overclocked and you'll be hard pressed to find a "reference" design anywhere. That being said there is very little to compare against and given that each card is tuned for its factory overclock pushing the cards "further" isn't going to get you much.
Read: they are already maxed out.
I'm not surprised that Scott came up with nothing for his conclusion and basically said buy what you like. Now, as an overclocker I know that GPU and Memory quality a HUGE factors in pushing factory overclocked cards because they are already maxed out. Likewise PCB design helps the tuning process and can benefit if you wish to void your warranty and really see what they are capable of.
Bottom line: Most people looking to buy a GTX 960 are doing so because they cannot afford a GTX 970 and likely won't do anything to the card aside from installing it and maybe blowing out the dust. This begs the question of "Why?" and it comes down to competition on the shelf. EVGA has the highest core clock, lets buy that one, oh ASUS is the smallest, lets buy that one, wow MSI has a light up dragon, omg I need that.
These companies are giving you good performance on the dollar and the lack of performance gain from overclocking is actually a good thing, it means they actually did their job and delivered.
Related Web URL: http://techreport.com/review/27806/five-geforce-gt...
