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For an NIVIDIA GeForce GTC 960, the PNY Elite OC 960 goes like the proverbial scalded cat. Equally important, is that its value makes a stock 960 and even an AMD R9 280X seem like a less than optimal deal – as you can see it comes within an hair of a factory overclocked R9 280X. That is rather impressive to say the least. Needless to say, if your budget can stretch this far, but not far enough to encompass a factory R9 280X, the PNY Elite OC is probably one of the better deals you will find right now.
Score Card and Summary
Packaging & Accessories: 7 out of 10
The Elite OC uses a classic PNY shipping container, and will come with classic PNY accessory bundle. Since we cannot with 100% prove that, we are going to dock it one point from our usual stance on such a combination. However, if you think this is unfair you can easily add a point to your own tally. In either case, the Elite OC should be considered adequate, but with an lifetime warranty deserves respect.
Functionality & Aesthetics: 17 out of 20
Good custom heatsink and fan solution. Check. Excellent factory overclock. Check. Good bordering of very good aesthetics….check. Performance that is surprising for a GeForce GTX 960. Double check! Honestly, the only two complaints anyone will have with the Elite OC in the Functionality & Aesthetics department is that they didn’t use the 980 Pro styling. That would have made this card visually stunning. In either case, PNY should have done some factory overclocking on the memory. The memory is the bottleneck of the 960 series and would have helped the Elite OC even more. Thankfully, this is a quick fix that does help boost performance even higher.
Build Quality & Warranty: 18 out of 20
The combination of lifetime warranty and custom heatsink design is a winning one and there really is not much to complain on this front.
Performance: 25 out of 30
This Elite OC may not post numbers like its bigger brother the PNY 980 Pro, but for a GeForce 960 what it can do is bordering on ‘miracle worker’ levels of improvement. To be blunt, this is the kind of performance NVIDIA should have been aiming for when they created the 960 series. Thankfully, PNY saw the opportunity and ran with it and the end result is a 1080P power house. Sadly, with the memory bottleneck still in place the Elite OC’s 1440P results are not as impressive. If you do run it at 1440P resolutions we strongly recommend overclocking the memory and boosting the memory bandwidth up as high as you can. In either case for a sub-$250 card the PNY 960 Elite OC is an excellent performer, worthy of respect.
Value: 19 out of 20
The Elite OC has as much in common with the typical GeForce GTX as a politician does with the truth. Simply put, it is hard to even put this card and reference 960s in the same sentence – except ironically. Lifetime warranty, excellent acoustics, great 1080P performance, there really is not much more you could ask for from an extra twenty dollar investment!
Final Score: 86 out of 100
This card deserves serious consideration not matter if you are team green or team red kind of person. Honestly the only reason this card does not rank even higher is because PNY did not overclock the RAM. This does impact high resolution gaming and keeps it from being perfect for all value sensitive consumers. However, if you only are interested in 1920×1080 resolution performance this card can easily be considered one of the best value today. In fact, at 1080P consumers will have a hard time justifying spending any more than what the Elite OC commands – as the gains are going to be small until you get into GeForce 980 / R9 290X territory!
