Gigabyte is amongst the select NVIDIA board partners that offer new Maxwell based high-end graphics cards from day one. The GTX 960 G1 Gaming ships with Gigabyte's latest Windforce cooler, which should be well capable of keeping the card cool at low temperatures. Apart from that there is a custom design PCB, so this pixel cannon looks like a really interesting contender.


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Presentation

Gigabyte is one of the first Nvidia add-in-card (AIC) partners that have decided to introduce a new custom GTX 960 graphics card that will use NVIDIAs latest and greatest GM206 chip. For this graphics card, Gigabyte makes use of a custom PCB paired up with its own custom Windforce 3X 300W cooler and on the flip-side of the card, there is a backplate with G1 Gaming design. A quick look at the specs also reveals that the card ships factory overclocked.

As always before the launch of a new chip generation from NVIDIA there have been loads of rumors on the specs before the launch. Browsing the specifications of this card we find 1024 CUDA cores, 85 TMUs and 32 ROPs. Looking for reference clocks we find 1'126 MHz core clock and 1'178 MHz boost clock.



As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshot below, Gigabyte decided to use a rather beefy high factory-overclock on the new GTX 960 G1 Gaming. While the reference GTX 960 with GM206 GPU is set to work at 1'126 MHz for the base clock and 1'178 MHz for the GPU Boost clock, the Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming  runs at 1'241 MHz core clock and 1'392 MHz boost clock.

When it comes to memory clock speeds we see a tiny, 12 MHz frequency boost, which makes the chips run at 7'012 MHz. Combine this with a 128 Bit memory interface and you end up with a total of over 112 Gigabyte of memory bandwidth, the Samsung memory on the new GTX 960 can be overclocked by factoy to at least 1800MHz instead of 1750MHz without any issue.

While the typical boost clock is set at 1'178 MHz, the maximum boost of 1'392 MHz was achieved quite easily and the GTX 960 G1 Gaming held that clock most of the load time due to the capable Windforce 3X 300W cooler as well as good TDP target (nVidia's Boost technology being power-based and not temperature-based on this card). At this point we also run Furmark to see how high the card overclocks, when the GPU is under full load. This way we can determine a worst case scenario regarding maximum boost clock. With the card we see clocks speeds of 1'392 MHz at 1.2v.

Specifications

	Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 960	GeForce GTX 960	ASUS GTX 960 STRIX OC Edition	GeForce GTX 760
Chip	GM206-300-A1	GM206-300-A1	GM206-300-A1	GK104 Kepler
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	2.94 billion	2.94 billion	2.94 billion	3.54 billion
GPU clock	1'241 MHz	1'126 MHz	1'253 MHz	960 MHz
GPU Boost clock	1'392 MHz	1'178 MHz	1'404 MHz	1'033 MHz
Memory GDDR5	2'048 MB	2'048 MB	2'048 MB	2'048 MB
Memory clock	1'703 (7'012) MHz	1'750 (7'010) MHz	1'800 (7'200) MHz	1'500 (6'000) MHz
Memory interface	128 Bit	128 Bit	128 Bit	256 Bit
Memory bandwidth	112'200 MB/s	112'160 MB/s	115'200 MB/s	192'200 MB/s
TMUs	85	85	85	96
Shader Cores	1024	1024	1024	1'152
ROPs	32	32	32	32
TDP	160 Watt	120 Watt	120 Watt	170 Watt
Slots	2	2	2	Reference Design
Cooler	WindForce 3X 300W	NVIDIA Reference	DirectCU II	NVIDIA Reference

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 13 - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Page 2 - The card	Page 14 - Thief
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 15 - GRID Autosport
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 16 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 17 - Metro Last Light
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 18 - Assassin’s Creed Unity
Page 7 - Borderlands - The Pre-Sequel	Page 19 - Far Cry 4
Page 8 - BattleField 4	Page 20 - Power Consumption
Page 9 - Watch Dogs	Page 21 - Temperatures / Noise Levels
Page 10 - Tomb Raider	Page 22 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 11 - Sniper Elite 3	Page 23 - Prices
Page 12 - Crysis 3	Page 24 - Conclusion