PNY Geforce XLR8 GTX 960 Elite

PNY GTX 960 Elite - Introduction While we would all love to be able to own one, two, or even three PNY 980 OC cards the reality is most consumers ultimate decision depends on the perceived value of a card. Simply put customers are willing to spend $200-250 instead of $150-$200 but only if the card offers tangibly better value . Unfortunately, the most often - and most valid - criticism leveled against NVIDIA's x60 series is that they are a value orientated card that sometimes lacks value. On the surface offering customers half the CUDA Cores, ROPS and texture units of their 980 video cards for about 1/3 the price does sound like a winning combination. In theory that should even allow customer who have the budget for one reference GeForce 980 GTX the luxury of saving some money without negatively impacting performance. Sadly, the reality is that along with the other cuts NVIDIA has also cut the memory bus in half - and thus the memory bandwidth potential in half. This is what causes the typical reference 960's price to performance ratio to plummet, why fewer customers go the SLI route instead of the single card route, and why AMD holds such a strong grip in this price range. What if we told you that this does not need to be the case and that the majority of the problems with a reference 960 can be overcome with copious amounts of overclocking? At least that is what PNY believes as their newest GeForce GTX 960 is not the typical 960. Instead the all new PNY GeForce 960 GTX Elite OC comes with one of the highest factory overclocks you can find. To be precise they have taken the stock settings of 1,127MHz base /1,178MHz boost and cranked them all the way to 1,304MHz / 1,367MHz. While such an high factory overclock on the GPU was not carried over to the memory - it is still at a reference 7010Mhz - this brute force approach may just help alleviate the rather anemic performance that can sometimes plague stock 960s…and if it doesn’t the custom heatsink should allow customers to pump up the memory speed - and thus the bandwidth. When you mix in a lifetime warranty that covers the factory overclock, the PNY 960 Elite OC sounds like a rather impressive take on what a mid-range card should be; however what really will catch consumers eye is the fact that PNY has done all this and only increased the asking price by 20 dollars. Personally we would gladly spend twenty dollars just to get rid of the reference blower fan solutions that most GeForce 960's use - as they are sub optimal to say the least. If however PNY is correct their 960 Elite OC may just not only regain ground that NVIDIA seceded to AMD, but may be one of the best blends of performance, price, and warranty that the market has seen in recent history. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Specifications and Features PNY GTX 960 Elite - Closer Look For consumers who have never heard of the GeForce GTX 960 and the GPU that powers it, the GM206 can be considered a further cut down version of Maxwell core that powers the GeForce GTX 980 series. To envision this, imagine the GeForce GTX 980's 'GM204-200' core with its 4 Graphic Process Clusters (GPC), with each of these GPCs being made up of four streaming multiprocessor(SMM) 'blocks', one 64-bit memory controller and one Rasterizer engine. Each SMM block consists of 32 CUDA cores, 8 Raster Operation Pipelines (ROPs), and 8 Texture Units - plus other low level goodies. Now imagine slicing off one SMM in three of the four GPC's and you have the GeForce 970's version of the GM204 core - the 'GM204-400'. Now imagine taking that selfsame 980 Maxwell core (GM204-200) and the factory cuts off two full Graphic Processing Clusters instead of just pairing off a few SMMs. That in a nutshell is what the GM206 is, two Maxwell Graphic Processing Clusters with 8 SMMs and two memory controllers instead of 4 GPCs, 16 SMMs and 4 memory controllers. In other words, on paper the GM206 has approximately half the horsepower of the 'original' Maxwell GM204-200, with only two memory controller and only 'needing' 2GB of memory instead of 4GB. In fact it is pretty much safe to say that's what NVIDIA designer did when designing the GM206 - AKA GeForce GTX 960 series. They took the GM204-200 Maxwell core and cut it in half. However this is being a touch over simplistic as while yes it does indeed have exactly half the ROPS/Texture Units/Cuda Cores of a GeForce 980's GM204, and while yes its memory bus has also been halved from 256-bit to 128-bit, the GM206 is not simply a GM204 with half of the GPC's disabled. Instead NVIDIA did the cutting on the drafting table, and created a new smaller core than the GM204. The end result is not only a new Maxwell core, but one that is more efficient than if they simply used 'defective' GM204s with half the cores disabled. In fact the new GM206 weighs in at 56.54% of the GM204-200,with a respectable 2.94 Billion transistors instead of 2.6Billion if it was just a halved GM204-200. In order to boost performance compared to previous x60 series (which has more CUDA cores and a larger memory bus) NVIDIA has significantly boosted the based and boost clock speeds over what is found on the GM204 counterparts. This is because they had the luxury of having a TDP that is not 50% of the 980 but is closer to 73%. To be precise a reference GM204-200 'GeForce 980' comes with a base clock of 1,126MHz that can be boosted to 1,216Mhz and stay within its 165 watt TDP limit. Compare and contrast to a reference GM206 core which has a base clock of 1,127MHz that can go to 1,178 and has to stay within a 120watt TDP specification. Mix in a much more efficient architecture and on paper this new GM206 is up to 1.4 times more potent in 'apples to apples' comparison to previous x60s. In previous generations the idea of a 128-bit memory bus on a mid-tier card would be a non-starter as the underlying design would not be optimized properly to make use of it. The GM206 on the other hand has been optimized to take full advantage of the smaller pipe-line and at lower resolutions this anemic memory bandwidth of 112.16GB/s should not be an issue. At higher resolutions it may start to cause problems but inexpensive video cards performance levels always suffer at higher resolutions. This at least was the theory NIVIDA were going on when they designed the GM206 core. Sadly, reality always has the right of way and just like the proverbial Mac truck barreling down a one way street it ran over NIVIDA's elegant theory. The reality of the matter is the combination of small 128-bit bus and rather small CUDA/TOP/etc count made the 960 rather easy meat for the AMD R9 280X. Since both cards compete in the same $200 price range, the only area a reference GeForce GTX 960 was a clear and concise winner was in the power and noise department. Everywhere else the Tahiti XTL at $200 price point proved to be the better overall value for most consumers. This is where the PNY GeForce GTX 960 Elite OC enters the equation. Due to the design limitations of the GM206 architecture there was nothing PNY could do on the memory controller side of the equation; so in an interesting and controversial move they have left the memory entirely alone. This means you can expect 'your' 960 Elite OC to come standard with 2GB of memory that is clocked at an effective speed of 7,010Mhz with a bandwidth of 112.16GB/s - just like a reference GeForce GTX 960. This is controversial because the most obvious bottleneck is on the memory side of equation and yet PNY has done nothing to help alleviate it. Instead PNY feels confident that the right solution was to boost the performance of those two Graphic Processing Clusters and cranked the performance dial all the way to 'ludicrous speeds'…and maybe they've even gone to plaid. Concisely put they have bestowed upon the Elite OC a 16% factory overclock that boosts the stock speed from 1,127MHz to 1,304MHz and the boost speed from 1,178 to a whopping 1,367MHz. How big a boost on real world performance this 16% factory overclock translates to remains to be seen, but it should be on the significant end of the spectrum. To help keep such a large overclock cool and stable, PNY has carried over one of their smaller previous XLR8 'OC' custom dual slot cooler designs. This design consists of a dual tower, dual fan, multi-heat pipe setup that was originally created to handle a much hotter running core. Specifically it was created to keep an overclocked 170w TDP 'GK104' GeForce GTX 760 happy and cool. This means when paired to the GM206 this cooler has an additional 50 watts of cooling potential that can be put towards keeping both noise and temperatures in check. Further helping to keep the VRM and memory components cool and long-lived, PNY have included a secondary heatsink. This large flat heatsink covers nearly the entire PCB and actually has cooling fans which extend past the PCB. To further increase its cooling efficiency, this secondary heatsink actively recycles the waste air from the two down draft coolers. Basically after the air passes through the main towers that keep the GM206 core cool, they then flow over this black heatsink. Then and only then is the air allowed to exit the Elite OC. To ensure that most of the air from the fans actually makes it to the secondary heatsink - and does not just leak out the sides of the main cooling towers - PNY uses a full fascia covering. As with most of PNY's XLR8 series, this robust aluminum fascia has been painted an aggressive flat black with yellow racing stripes. We do still prefer the PNY 980's brushed aluminum aesthetics to the typical XLR8's more 'gaming' orientation, but the Elite OC is still darn good looking. Unfortunately the back of the Elite OC has not been covered with a backplate, but given the more low cost nature of this new model, it is an acceptable oversight. Interestingly enough, even though this is a heavily overclocked card PNY has been able to keep power consumption extremely low. PNY states that this card should still have a TDP of only 120 watts. While we have our doubts about the Elite OC not consuming more power than a reference GeForce 960 what is certain is that only a single 6-pin PCIe connector was needed. The input selection of the Elite OC 960 is pretty much standard options found on any GeForce 960 GTX - it is actually the same as PNY's reference GeForce 960. In total you get one DVI connector, one full sized HDMI port, and three full size DisplayPorts. This covers all the bases nicely and does so without needing adapters. Equally important due to the layout there is plenty of rear ventilation slits so some of hot air should still exhaust out the back of the case - even though this card makes use of a custom dual downdraft cooler instead of a reference blower design. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Testing Methodology To fully test the abilities of a given video card, we have used a blend of in-game benchmarks and custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have used FRAPS to record the minimum and average frame rates and to do so for a set period of time. All tests were run a minimum of four times and the scores are the average of all four runs. All games were patched to their latest version. The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied. All games were tested at the two of the most popular resolutions of 1080P (1920x1080) and then again at 1440P (2560x1440). This means each game’s tested was run a minimum of 8 times: 4 @ 1080P and 4 @1440P. Before testing Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card. This was done to ensure that long term performance and not short term performance is being illustrated. The games used for testing were: Sleeping Dogs Metro: Last Light BioShock Infinite Crysis 3 Batman: Arkham Origins Tomb Raider Battliefield 4 Assassins Creed: Black Flag Call of Duty: Ghosts For stress testing we used Unigine’s Valley benchmark. For overclocking we used either the manufactures included software overclocking program or if necessary EVGA’s Precision X program. Drivers: GeForce 350.12 AMD Catalyst: 14.12 Omega Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 5930K Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2666 Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Cooling: Noctua U12S SSD: 1x Seagate 600 Pro 400GB, 2x Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs. Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Synthetic Game Benchmarks (SGB) In the Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of benchmark comparisons of the test card and other comparable GPUs, using various benchmarks which come included with five popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance this card has to offer. To ensure that long term performance is and not short term performance is illustrated 15 minutes of Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run to ‘warm up’ the video card. Only then were any tests run on the now warm video card. Real World In-Game Benchmarks (RWGB) In the Real Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of timed real world game play results using FRAPS and four popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance the card being tested has to offer, and do so in a way which cannot be unduly skewed by driver ‘optimizations’ which have been included for the sole purpose of improving benchmark results. While not as common as it once was such optimizing is still not unheard of by either AMD or NVIDIA. Once again Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card prior to testing. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Sleeping Dogs (SGB) Sleeping Dogs is an open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix, released on August 2012. Sleeping Dogs has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are the Extreme display settings and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. World density is set to extreme, Vsync disabled, high-res textures are enabled, and shadow resolution, shadow filtering, screen space ambient occlusion, and quality motion blur are all set to high. At both resolutions the PNY 960 Elite OC is about 9% faster than a reference GeForce 960. This is a very nice boost and means that a factory overclocked R9 280X is less than 3% faster. Even more impressive is that at 1080P the PNY 960 Elite OC is only 6% slower than a reference GeForce 970. Of course, at higher resolutions the PNY 960 Elite OC does quickly fall back from the likes of the 970 - its nearly 25% slower - so highly overclocking the GM206 core only gets you so far. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Metro: Last Light (SGB) Metro: Last Light is a DX11 first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver released in May 2013. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play. Scene D6 was used and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Very High for quality and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. DirectX 11 is used, texture filtering is set to AF 16X, motion blur is normal, SSA turned on and tessellation is set to high. As with Sleeping Dogs you will see massive gains from opting for this heavily overclocked PNY 960 Elite OC instead of a reference GeForce 960. Once again the PNY 960 Elite OC is more optimal a solution at 1080P instead of 1440P, but given the price range of this card that is not overly concerning. PNY GTX 960 Elite - BioShock Infinite (SGB) BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, and published by 2K Games released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are UltraDX11 (option 3) for quality and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1800. At 1080P the PNY 960 Elite OC comes within grasping distance of a factory overclocked R9 280X and while it does fall back at 1440P is still less than 3% slower! Considering it costs almost 9% less that the PNY 960 Elite OC is shaping up to be one heck of a bargain. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Tomb Raider (SGB) Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game published by Square Enix and released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Ultimate default settings for quality (sans 'hair' shading), VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Tomb Raider is an AMD centric title and yet the PNY 960 Elite OC basically ties the more expensive Asus R9 280X Top. That is impressive to say the least! PNY GTX 960 Elite - Batman Arkham Origins (SGB) Batman: AO is an action-adventure video game published by Warner Bros and released in October 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Anti-Aliasing is set to TXAA (high). Motion blur, Distortion, Lens Flare, Light Shafts, and Reflections set to On. Geometry, Dynamic Shadows, Depth of Field, and Ambient Occlusion all set to DX11 Enhanced. For an additional investment of only $20 consumers will gain an additional 8-9 percent of performance over a reference GeForce GTX 960. That is pretty much the definition of a good deal. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Battlefield 4 (RWGB) Battlefield 4 is first person shooter video game, published by EA Digital Illusions CE and released in October 2013. Unlike most, this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming tests. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded the first 90 seconds of the single player Tashgar level. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Ultra pre-set for quality, with VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. NIVDIA has worked long and hard at tweaking things for this game and the end result is that the cheaper PNY 960 Elite OC offers better than 98% of what the ASUS factory R9 280X. Color us impressed. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Assassins Creed: Black Flag (RWGB) Assassins Creed: BF is an historical action-adventure video game, published by published by Ubisoft and released in October 2013. Like Battlefield 4 this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded a custom run through Havana’s marketplace. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Environment quality was set to very high, Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X, Ambient Occlusion set to HBAO+ (high), Shadow Quality set to ‘soft shadow’, Motion Blur and Volumetric Blur both set to On. Texture Quality, Reflection Quality, and God Rays all set to High. The huge number of things that happen during our normal run through in Assassins Creed Black Flag certainly favors the higher speeds of the PNY 960 Elite OC over that of a reference 960, but it also shows that the 128-bit bus is still too small for higher resolutions. Just by changing the resolution the PNY 960 Elite OC goes from being within grasping distance of a Asus R9 280X Top to lagging nearly 5% behind it. If only PNY had overclocked the ram and increased the memory bandwidth. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Call of Duty: Ghosts (RWGB) Call of Duty: Ghosts is a first person shooter video game, published by Activision and released in October 2013. Since it does not include an in-game benchmark, it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Ghost Stories' level, starting as soon as we resume control of Logan back on Earth. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Image Quality, Textures Resolution, Normal Map Resolution, and Specular Map Resolution set to Extra. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Antistrophic Filtering set to High, Terrain Detail set to ON, and Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X. With Shadows, Distortion, Motion Blue and Depth of Field set to Yes. Call of Duty: Ghosts produced the largest gains in any game tested. The gains were large enough that the PNY 960 Elite OC actually beat a factory overclocked R9 280X at 1080P resolutions. However, once the resolution was increased PNY 960 Elite OC was unable to continue to beat it and quickly lost ground. This shows both the strengths of the Elite OC (fast core) and its biggest weakness (128-bit memory controller). If PNY had overclocked the ram we are sure that it would have come a lot closer to the R9 280X at 1440P. By the same token, the PNY 960 Elite OC is still faster than a stock R9 280X and consumers only interested in 'team red solutions will have to spend nearly 9% more to beat this card. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Crysis 3 (RWGB) Crysis 3 is a first person shooter video game, published by Electronic Arts and released in February 2013. While older than some of the others it is one of the most visually stunning games released to date and puts a lot of demands on the GPU. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Post Human' level, starting as soon as soon as prophet is handed a Hammer II pistol by Psycho. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560x1440 and 1920x1080. Texture Quality, Game Effects, Objects, Particles, Post Processing, Shadows, Shading, Water, and System Specs all set to Very High. Motion Blur was set to High and Lens Flare was set to On. Anti-Aliasing was set to MSAA 8X and Antistrophic Filtering was set to 16x. Crysis 3 is another game that offers double digit performance increase over what a reference GTX 960 can do, and just goes to show how PNY were on the right track. Too bad NIVIDIA hobbled the GM206 so badly on the memory bandwidth side of the equation. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Temperature Test Results For all temperature testing the cards were used in an open test bed environment. Ambient temperature was kept at a constant 20°C (+/- 0.5°C) and if the ambient room temperatures rose above 21°C or dropped below 19°C at any time, all benchmarking was stopped until proper temperatures could normalized. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak temperature. For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes. When you combine a rather cool running core with a massive custom heatsink the results are almost a foregone conclusion. So much so that even a massive factory overclock can not overcome this combination! PNY GTX 960 Elite - Sound Level Test Results While everyone "hears" noise differently there is one easy way to remove all subjectivness and easily compare different fans: use a sound level meter. This way you can easily compare the various fans noise envelopes without us coloring the results and see what fans fit within your personal comfort level. Of course, we will endeavor to try and explain the various results - which are taken at a 15 inch distance from the GPU’s fan(s) - to help you gain an even better understanding of how loud a cooler's stock fan is, but even if you discount our personal opinions, the fact remains numbers don't lie. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak dB. For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes and recorded the peak dB. We knew during testing that this was a rather quite card during gaming scenarios and these results just underscore how good it is. Once again when you combine a cool running core with a large heatsink the fans just don't have to move as fast to keep it cool. PNY GTX 960 Elite - System Power Consumption To obtain accurate results we have connected the system to a Power Angle power meter that has in turn been attached to a 1500watt UPS. This ensures only 120volt power is supplied to the PSU and removes an variances that could potential crop up because of brownouts and power spikes. In order to stress the video card we have once again used Unigine’s Valley benchmark and ran it for 20 minutes to determine peak system power consumption. For idle results we have let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak idle power consumption. As expected the PNY 960 Elite OC does indeed use more power than a reference GeForce GTX 960 but in the grand scheme of thing the amount of extra power it uses is negligible. This goes double when you consider the fact that the more expensive ASUS R9 280X uses a heck of a lot more power. In either case we would never base our purchase decision on power consumption as the differences between both sides would take years to make a difference. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Overclocking To discover our sample’s overclocking abilities we used EVGA’s Precision X software and began raising power and thermal thresholds to the maximum allowed and then increased the voltage also to the maximum permitted. Then using Unigine’s Valley benchmark we began stability testing. As with the PNY GeForce 980 Pro, we went into the overclocking stage of the Elite OC with rather lowered expectations. This is not because the Elite OC's custom cooler and fan solution is bad; rather it is because PNY has already given the Elite OC a rather high factory overclock. With such little headroom left, we expected the only real gains to come from the memory side of the equation. Unlike the PNY 980 which did surprise us with a wealth of untapped potential, the GM206 core proved to be already near at its stable maximum settings. To be precise we were only able to boost the speeds from 1367MHz to 1390MHZ - or a mere 1.7%. On the surface that barely seems worth the effort, and we should be disappointed with this result. However, we are actually impressed with the Elite OC as it just shows that PNY are offering customers basically all the performance their GM206 cores have to offer. Sure you may get 1-3% more performance (we have seen GM206's hit in the low 1400's) but for twenty dollars they are not only doing all the hard work for you, but are also guaranteeing this new level of performance. On the memory side of the equation PNY still left a ton of room. In what seems almost like routine we easily hit an effective speed of 7,900MHz. To put that another way we found 12.7% of untapped potential in these Samsung ICs. Equally important this raised the memory bandwidth from a rather anemic 112.16GB/s to a better 126.4GB/s. This boost is what is mainly responsible for the additional frames per second improvement. PNY GTX 960 Elite - Performance Summary and TL;DR In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the game results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing it to similar products in all the games you will be able to easily find the game(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if it is the worth the investment. 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 1920x1080 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! PNY GTX 960 Elite - Closing Statement By simply cutting their larger Maxwell core in half, their memory bus in half, and calling it good enough NVIDIA really don’t seem to like their 960 series all that much. It is almost as if the 960 was an afterthought, meant to simply fill a perceived gap in their lineup. Simply put, they still cost too much to be considered optimal for HTPCs and occasional video gaming consumers, and yet don’t have the performance that more PC gaming orientated consumers crave. Worse still they really need to be SLI'ed before their value becomes readily apparent to most consumers. Compare and contrast this with AMDs method and it comes as no surprise that many consumers on a tight budget look to team red instead of team green to satisfy their $200 video card requirements. A highly factory overclocked 960 on the other hand is a horse of a different color. As we saw throughout testing by 'simply' turning the performance dial to '11' the lean and somewhat mean GM206 'Maxwell 2.0' core becomes a surprisingly good performer. While yes the PNY 960 Elite OC is still memory starved with its itty-bitty 128-bit bus, it easily beats a stock AMD R9 280X and even comes close to matching what a highly overclocked R9 280X can do. Add in the fact that it can do this while offering less heat, less noise, less power consumption, a lifetime warranty, and costs less than an overlocked R9 280X, and the Elite OC's value becomes rather obvious. Don’t get us wrong we still prefer higher performance cards for 1440P resolution, but at 1080P resolutions this 960 is an amazing value. To be fair hand waving away one of the largest factory overclocks you will find on a 960 anywhere does not do this card justice. Nor does it do PNY's engineers justice. To be clear this 960 is extremely overclocked and this takes a lot of time and effort to produce such a 'golden' line. PNY are obviously highly binning their GM206 cores they purchase from NVIDIA and are only use the best of the best for this 'Elite OC' series. The extra factory testing alone means getting a 'dud' is unlikely. When you add in the fact that it comes with a much better heatsink and fan solution, yet only costs about $20 more than what a reference GTX 960 will set you back, the end results are bordering on amazing. Yes that twenty dollars represents a ~10% increase in price but it still is only twenty bucks more than a stock GeForce GTX 960 commands. No matter how you look at it, that is one hell of a bargain. It is such a good bargain that at some point in the near future we will have to seriously look at SLI GeForce GTX 960 performance numbers. If what holds true for one holds true for two, then for builds where a reference GeForce GTX 980 is called for we would be strongly inclined towards saving nearly a hundred dollars and getting two of these bad boys instead. The performance, the warranty, and the value would be just too tempting to pass up. In the meantime, no matter if you are inclined more towards team red instead of team green, what PNY have created with their Elite OC 960 deserves your respect. Once again they have done what NVIDIA should have done in the first place, and in the process of 'correcting' most of the inherent issues of reference GeForce GTX 960 video cards they have done an enormous service to all consumers. After all, with such pressure now bearing on AMD, who are usually the value king, it is only a matter of time before factory overclocked R9 280X's prices start to fall. This in turn means all consumers - red or green - will start to get even better value for their hard earned dollars.

PNY Geforce XLR8 GTX 960 Elite

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