# MSI GTX 960 Gaming OC 2 GB



## W1zzard (Jan 19, 2015)

MSI's new GeForce GTX 960 Gaming comes overclocked out of the box. Just like previous MSI Gaming cards, the board runs extremely quiet, emitting almost no noise while gaming, and it also turns off its fans in idle. With a price of $200, MSI has chosen to go with NVIDIA's reference-design pricing.

*Show full review*


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## damric (Jan 22, 2015)

Seems good but only if upgrading from something like GTX 460/560.


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## rodneyhchef (Jan 22, 2015)

Half a 980 but more than half the performance. Not bad when you look at it like that

Initial pricing here in the uk is quite high - £180 for this card, less than half the price of the 980 though. SLI anyone?


Interesting to note the two spare memory chip locations, perhaps for a 3gb version with uneven memory allocations like on the 560SEs? or perhaps for a 192bit version.....................


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## Yellow&Nerdy? (Jan 22, 2015)

Safe bet from Nvidia. Same price to performance as the R9 285, but a lot more power efficient. AMD is starting to lack a bit in the architectural department. Let's hope Fiji is more power efficient than the current Hawaii and Tonga cores.


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## SmokingCrop (Jan 22, 2015)

Seems like some psychological marketing trick to get people to buy the GTX 970 instead..
but maybe the prices will drop soon.


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## wrathchild_67 (Jan 22, 2015)

At only 20w higher maximum power consumption than a Geforce 650 TI Boost and nearly a 100% performance gain over that card, it looks like the 960 is the new TI Boost replacement. I was never sold on the 750 TI as the successor to the 650 TI Boost since it was slower and required vBIOS hacks to allow overlocking to beat a TI Boost. Now it just needs to come down by $25 to match the TI Boost's original price point.


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## Steevo (Jan 22, 2015)

Having paid a whopping $160 for a 7970 with a full block installed that reaches 1250 on the core, and seeing how poorly this card performs against a admittedly 30% more power hungry, but years old design shows the economy of scale in the architecture, essentially its like driving a Ferrari with half the engine, that then gets its ass kicked by a a hand me down Honda. 

Love the review, but you could eject the line about Office or HTPC, I don't think that is the market for this card at all. I expect a price war shortly as it gets priced to be competitive against AMD cards.


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## robplumm (Jan 22, 2015)

damric said:


> Seems good but only if upgrading from something like GTX 460/560.



or from a GTX 275 like I will be


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## MarianSony (Jan 22, 2015)

or from gts 250 xD


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## Jeffredo (Jan 22, 2015)

Steevo said:


> Having paid a whopping $160 for a 7970 with a full block installed that reaches 1250 on the core, and seeing how poorly this card performs against a admittedly 30% more power hungry, but years old design shows the economy of scale in the architecture, essentially its like driving a Ferrari with half the engine, that then gets its ass kicked by a a hand me down Honda.
> 
> Love the review, but you could eject the line about Office or HTPC, I don't think that is the market for this card at all. I expect a price war shortly as it gets priced to be competitive against AMD cards.



Your card was never intended to be its target.  Think people replacing a GTX 660 or HD 7850.  A better analogy is you're driving the old Ferrari that can barely pull away from a new Honda Civic Si.


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## Steevo (Jan 22, 2015)

Jeffredo said:


> Your card was never intended to be its target.  Think people replacing a GTX 660 or HD 7850.  A better analogy is you're driving the old Ferrari that can barely pull away from a new Honda Civic Si.


Except it does, to the tune of about 30% faster than the highest performance Civic, and it costs less, so I am not sure where the downside is for me, or for anyone else who should instead buy a used card and get better performance for less dollars.


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## Naito (Jan 23, 2015)

I honestly think this card is too expensive for what is. Nvidia has really missed an opportunity here.


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## sergionography (Jan 23, 2015)

damric said:


> Seems good but only if upgrading from something like GTX 460/560.


 I see it more of an upgrade for people who had gts450 or gtx550



rodneyhchef said:


> Half a 980 but more than half the performance. Not bad when you look at it like that
> 
> Initial pricing here in the uk is quite high - £180 for this card, less than half the price of the 980 though. SLI anyone?
> 
> ...


Well it would be impressive if it consumed half of the power as 980 but it really doesn't, and as for the 980 its performance is pretty familiar and is nothing revolutionary, it was the Low power that impressed everyone




Yellow&Nerdy? said:


> Safe bet from Nvidia. Same price to performance as the R9 285, but a lot more power efficient. AMD is starting to lack a bit in the architectural department. Let's hope Fiji is more power efficient than the current Hawaii and Tonga cores.



Well Maxwell in the 980 sure is efficient based on It's performance, but as for this card(gtx960) it's okay but not great, it only looks good because the 285 Tonga is worse lol, but remember Tonga is a Tahiti size chip with a crapload of the hardware disabled making its pretty leaky and inefficient, but for example let's compare it to the 3 year old pitcairn chip(which in my opinion is one of the most efficient gcn chips) r9 270x, then u notice the 960 is only about 10-15% faster while consuming the same power which is reasonable because both chips are of the same die size and what not at around 200mm2, so I'm not sure if it's a architecture lacking like u make it sound.

Now on a different note it does feel lIle gcn is a pretty bandwidth hungry architecture which makes it more tricky I guess between different chips causing more variance. pitcarn in particular had more than enough bandwidth to feed its graphics crunching units so its no surprise it performed well


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## rtwjunkie (Jan 23, 2015)

Looking through the fps, on average it seems to beat the 660Ti by 8-10 fps consistently.  On the face of it, not so much.  But those extra fps moves those games from semi-playable to reasonably playable, so I have to say I think it is worthy of an upgrade for people on a 660Ti.


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## cibgks (Feb 13, 2015)

Jeffredo said:


> Your card was never intended to be its target.  Think people replacing a GTX 660 or HD 7850.  A better analogy is you're driving the old Ferrari that can barely pull away from a new Honda Civic Si.



First, sorry for my english I am from Argentina. I actually have a HD 7850 2gb by gigabyte and I wanted to buy this gpu but the only thing I doubt is: 

Will be 2gb vram enough for gaming in the next 2 years? 

If not, I should go and buy 280x but my PSU is a seasonic 520w and I don't know if it will be short (no money this month for changing gpu + psu)


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## Naito (Feb 13, 2015)

cibgks said:


> Will be 2gb vram enough for gaming in the next 2 years?



If you are gaming at 1080P, then most likely would be enough for another 2 years.


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## Thuban (May 20, 2016)

Naito said:


> If you are gaming at 1080P, then most likely would be enough for another 2 years.


Surprised, that Wizz didn't mention it in the cons that 2GB would bottneneck the card later on in its life, which was clear enough at the time of the release (although, no actual games showed it back then). Still a little shortsighted it was, imo. Here's just another game showing a significant  advantage of the 960 w/ 4 gigs of framebuffer and it hasn't even been two years.


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## SmokingCrop (May 20, 2016)

Thuban said:


> Surprised, that Wizz didn't mention it in the cons that 2GB would bottneneck the card later on in its life, which was clear enough at the time of the release (although, no actual games showed it back then). Still a little shortsighted it was, imo. Here's just another game showing a significant  advantage of the 960 w/ 4 gigs of framebuffer and it hasn't even been two years.


He couldn't have known for sure. Just look at the witcher 3 to see how it should/can be. It does 4K on max settings with less than 2GB.
The new consoles with much more (V)RAM are to blame for it. Same thing with normal RAM, more and more games are going to 16GB recommended.. Not because there isn't any other way, but because publishers don't give the money/time to optimise it.


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