NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 960 brings the Maxwell GPU architecture to the masses. Priced at around $200, the sweet-spot, the card caters to value-oriented gamers who don't want to break the bank with their GPU purchase. The GTX 960 is great for 1080p gaming with all titles, but some of the recent ones may require you to drop details a bit, or turn anti-aliasing off. In terms of performance, we only see a disappointing 9% improvement over the previous-generation GTX 760, as compared to the GTX 660 (from which a lot of users might upgrade) with a 27% improvement. The GTX 660 Ti lags behind by 14%. AMD's offerings in this segment are strong as the R9 285 roughly matches what the GTX 960 offers in performance, while the R9 280X is around 15% faster. Unfortunately, we couldn't include the R9 280 Non-X in our benchmarks because AMD never bothered to sample the card to us. NVIDIA's own GTX 970 is 58% faster than the GTX 960, which suggests that we will definitely see a GTX 960 Ti variant that sits in the middle in both price and performance. MSI's GTX 960 Gaming comes overclocked out of the box with a relatively small overclock that provides a 3% performance improvement. Unfortunately, memory isn't overclocked, which would have netted it a little bit of performance, but performance differences between cards are essentially negligible as one more frame per second would go by unnoticed.

Where the GTX 960 really excels because of the Maxwell architecture is power efficiency. The card is around 25% more power-efficient than the GTX 760, which not only reduces power requirements (think PSU capacity) because it also reduces heat output considerably. Thanks to these improvements, all GTX 960 cards we tested today run extremely quietly and even turn off their fans completely in idle or light gaming. This approach is a godsend for all office- and Media-PC systems where keeping things as quietly as possible is paramount. Start gaming and all our tested cards run at an extremely quiet 27 dBA, which means the card is inaudible when installed into a closed case.
We've seen MSI's thermal design before, and it does a fine job. I only wish MSI had included a backplate, which ASUS does. The cooler also seems a bit big, physically, for such card, which could limit its compatibility with very compact cases.
Overclocking potential of all cards is roughly the same, too, as all cards reach around 1400 MHz on the GPU, which helps in providing some extra performance. Since all cards use the same memory chips, memory overclocking results are also similar.

In terms of pricing, NVIDIA has set a $200 MRSP, which is very reasonable, but not good enough to take over the price/performance crown in this segment, which AMD has covered with such competitively priced cards as the R9 280, R9 285, and the R9 280X. All of those have a slightly better price/performance ratio than the GTX 960. The current price/performance king is the R9 290, which, at $270, isn't completely out of reach either. However, the integral difference to me and a ton of users is that NVIDIA's new GTX 960 is so very power efficient, which makes it run much cooler and quieter than AMD's cards. What makes me a little sad with this review is that all cards I reviewed are pretty much identical; same performance, same temps, same power, and same noise. The only noteworthy thing to set them apart is form-factor and pricing. This tells me that NVIDIA is exercising a lot of control over what board partners can and can't do. Such definitely worked out well in terms of fan noise, but a little more variation would have been nice. Should this trend continue, it might make sense for me to do no more than a single summarizing review instead of separate articles because noteworthy differences are beginning to fade.

Personally, I don't think upgrading from a GTX 760 is worth the cost, and upgrading from a GTX 660 Ti probably isn't worth it either. If you have a GTX 660 and some money to spend, or are looking for a card to drive your new PC, the GTX 960 is definitely an excellent choice. Value-oriented buyers should also consider used GTX 680/770/780 class cards which should hit the market soon. I'm expecting AMD to react to the GTX 960 with new price reductions which will probably stir things around a bit, but ultimately, NVIDIA seems to have captured this segment as well, with a cheap-to-make GPU they paired with an extremely cost-efficient PCB design that has loads of margins in it for future price wars with AMD.