Final Thoughts
NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture has been very impressive and right now the GTX 970 and GTX 980 cards seem to be the favorite of everyone right now. With the GTX 960 NVIDIA wants to compete in the $200 price range and really bring a great price to performance ratio to gamers. Many gamers that I know do not want to spend over $250 on a card, so this a great space for NVIDIA to dominate like they have on the higher-end cards. On paper the card that the GTX 960 best competes with is AMD’s Radeon R9 295. In our testing both cards exchanged blows and were very close in all tests, but when it comes to power consumption the GTX 960 comes out as the winner and the card we would most recommend.
MSI has put their own flavor on the GTX 960 with the GTX 960 Gaming 2G. The thing that stands out about this card the most is its factory overclocked speeds of 1216 MHz core and 1279 MHz boost. This is of course an overclock from the stock GTX 960 speeds which are 1127 MHz core and 1178 MHz boost. While this is not the fastest GTX 960 out there, a factory overclock is always nice.
MSI has also implemented their new Twin Frozr V cooling solution on this card. This cooling solution was in development for 18 months an MSI has made quite a lot of improvements. It is smaller, features stronger fans and generates less noise than the previous version. This card offers Zero Frozr, which eliminates fan noise in low-load situations. This means the fans will not spin up until the card reaches a certain thermal load. So you really have an extremely silent card.
Over the years a software suite has become very important deciding factor in choosing a product, especially motherboards and now we are seeing great software suites come with graphics cards. MSI’s Afterburner software has been around as long as I can remember and it is a great utility to tune and track speeds and temperatures. Adding to the software mix is MSI’s Gaming App. This utility allows for instant overclocking and down-clocking of the card, ability to adjust the LED settings, and more! It is great to see MSI adding this software to give you the customer more customization options.
At the end of the day this is one of the best GTX 960 cards available, with great performance, Twin Frozr V cooling and looks to match it is definitely a card we can recommend. Right now you can pick up this card for $209.00 at my favorite online retailer. Overall ThinkComputers gives the MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2G Graphics Card a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Factory overclocked
– Twin Frozr V cooling
– Extremely silent
– Price
– Looks great
– Great software bundle
Cons:
– Not the fastest GTX 960 out there
