EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB SSC GAMING ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling w/ Free Installed Backplate Graphics Card 04G-P4-3967-KR

I am very happy with this GPU. I upgraded from an AMD R7 200 series card, because of difficulty playing TSW, Elite:Dangerous and using the Oculus Rift DK2.

Upon opening the box I joked that EVGA had mistakenly sent me a small motherboard instead of a GPU. It is massive compared to my old AMD R7.

Installation: You will need space for this beast, look at the photo included to get an idea of the size. Once I made room I had no difficulties getting the GPU to seat in the PCI connector, I did find the power connection difficult. So difficult that I removed the GPU, and spent a few minutes trying to figure out why it would not seat, I finally finessed the power input into the socket with some force. Reseated the GPU and was good to go. The GPU comes with a CD with the Drivers on it, plus overclocking software.
(It is recommended that you register the GPU before the installation since the S/N can only be found on the bottom of the GPU)

Playing Elite Dangerous is like night and day. Where I struggled on low/mid graphics with the R7, the 960 plays on high settings, and putting on the Oculus Rift was stunning. I am now finally able to appreciate the power of VR, Oculus needs to hurry up with the 4k consumer version it will be a must have.

The Secret World is a whole new game with the visuals maxed out, a whole new game.

There is nothing worse than a gamer with a sub-par rig, and after extensive research over a few days I chose the 960 and a EVGA Supernova 750W G2 power supply to fuel the beast. I am very happy that I did.

The GPU is not that noisy, if you have ever had a high speed hard drive it is comparable to that, and yet to have had any heat issues, which I felt might be a concern because the massive size.

I am also much happier with NVIDIA’s control center, I found AMD’s Catalyst to be annoying.

Not sure what else to say but, I am a happy gamer!

Purchased for my first ever desktop computer custom build, designed for heavy gaming, but without blowing the bank account to smithereens, this graphics card really hit the right spot for me. To start with, I chose NVIDIA over AMD for two main reasons:
1 – AMD cards ALWAYS require more power, and use more power (substantially more) than the comparable NVIDIA cards (for example, this card will draw about 108 Watts in a gaming scenario, whereas the comparable AMD Radeon R9 285 in a comparable gaming scenario will draw about 176 Watts). No, this difference isn’t going to destroy an electric bill, but over time, it would add up, making the AMD card more expensive in the long run.
2 – AMD cards typically run hotter than the comparable NVIDIA cards as well, not as much of a difference here, but I preferred to play it safe.

Now why I chose the EVGA model?

It didn’t come down to much, just really chose something I figured would be solid. I really liked that this card had a backplate, as well as so many connectivity options. I also purchased the Super SuperClocked version, giving this card the biggest possible advantage for it being a 960, and EVGA’s overclocking software is fairly convenient to use, especially when you’re using one of their cards.

On to actual thoughts:

I really like this card. I had really high hopes for how it would perform, and it holds up to most of those. You won’t be playing Dying Light or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt on completely maxed Ultra settings, that I can guarantee you. But it does stand up very well to modern titles and is completely capable of playing anything on the market right now, at varying qualities, but it can play most titles around about one step down from Ultra. It runs fairly cool, I need to rework my fan setup and some other cooling things in my case, but it does cool itself just fine, no worry of thermal bottlenecking.

I was surprised by the weight when I got it out of the package, not to mention the size, this card is hefty to say the least. The coating is a matte finished black with some decals, and the backplate is a glossy black (nice feature by the way). The connection ports all come with black port blockers to keep dust and debris from causing connectivity issues, and it also comes with a power cable adapter, which most people will need to use, and it comes with a DVI to VGA adapter, so this can literally use nearly every display connection type there is, granted there is a clear bias towards Display Port with 3 of them being included.

The card fit just fine in my Zalman Z11 Plus case, and works well with my ASUS Z97-A motherboard.
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I will include game benchmarks scores for my rig with this graphics card in it:

My Rig:
Intel i5-4690K
EVGA SSC NVIDIA GTX 960 4GB
ASUS Z97-A
8GB DDR3
Corsair CX600M PSU
Windows 10 Pro

BioShock Infinite: Ultra ~ Maxed Settings –
AVERAGE: 72
MINIMUM: 26
MAXIMUM: 117

Tomb Raider (2013): Ultra Preset –
AVERAGE: 86
MINIMUM: 70
MAXIMUM: 102

Hitman: Absolution: Ultra Preset w/ MSAA OFF –
AVERAGE: 70
MINIMUM: 58
MAXIMUM: 82

Thief: High Preset –
AVERAGE: 60
MINIMUM: 49
MAXIMUM: 78

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor: Very High Preset –
AVERAGE: 64
MINIMUM: 46
MAXIMUM: 90

ARMA 2: ALL Settings on High –
Benchmark 1 AVERAGE: 60
Benchmark 2 AVERAGE: 24

Metro 2033 Redux: High Preset w/ Tesselation on High, Texture Filtering on AF 16X, SSAA OFF, Advanced PhysX OFF –
AVERAGE: 71
MINIMUM: 21
MAXIMUM: 222

Metro: Last Light: High Preset w/ Tesselation on High, SSAA OFF, Advanced PhysX OFF –
AVERAGE: 69
MINIMUM: 22
MAXIMUM: 153

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat: Extreme Preset –
Day AVERAGE: 67
Day MINIMUM: 35
Day MAXIMUM: 99
Night AVERAGE: 72
Night MINIMUM: 44
Night MAXIMUM: 102
Rain AVERAGE: 76
Rain MINIMUM: 53
Rain MAXIMUM: 111
Sun-shafts AVERAGE: 51
Sun-shafts MINIMUM: 35
Sun-shafts MAXIMUM: 73

Just Cause 2: ALL Settings Maxed –
The Dark Tower AVERAGE: 69
Desert Sunrise AVERAGE: 77
Concrete Jungle AVERAGE: 64

Far Cry 2: Ultra High Preset –
Ranch – Long Benchmark AVERAGE: 117
MINIMUM: 66
MAXIMUM: 253

Sleeping Dogs: High Preset w/ NO HD Texture Pack –
AVERAGE: 58
MINIMUM: 46
MAXIMUM: 63

Man… where to start?
run on: i5 4690, 8gb of DDR3 1600, Z97 chipset motherboard. Nothing overclocked (unless you count the factory overclock on this card)

It’s quiet, it’s fast, and it is really gotta be the best bang for the buck in this price range. It benchmarks well against the Radeon R9 280x for about the same price, and half of the power usage. Yes, it won’t stack up against the 970, and even two of these in SLI won’t beat a 980 because 2gb plus 2gb doesn’t equal 4gb in this scenario. But really, for the price, this will play anything decently at 1080p. If I had a 4k monitor, I would have had to seriously consider going up to a much more expensive card… but considering that at the time of this review, I can only assume they make 4k monitors out of pure Unicorn tears, that probably isn’t going to come up any time soon.

Install was easy, though it is a tight squeeze in a standard mid tower case. I had to move one of my hard drives to a lower bay to give the card enough clearance.

I bought this as overkill to play the not terribly graphics intensive Guild Wars 2, which looks beautiful. Ultra settings with everything maxed got me an average of 84FPS. I had to frame limit it to 60. I have yet to dip below that 60 that I notice, including with lots of action on screen. This thing isn’t even trying hard. Fans have only come on intermittently.

The benchmarks indicate that pretty much nothing currently out will give it a great deal of trouble at 1080p. I think this is going to work out for quite some time for me. And it runs so cool that it will probably last for ages.