![]() Where the “right” peak temperature lies for each GPU will vary from card to card, but typically, you’ll want to keep it around or below the 90-degree Celsius mark. The GPU-tweaking utilities we mention a little later will all report GPU temps as well. Most motherboard manufacturers have utilities available to read the thermal sensors on their boards, and your system BIOS will report hardware health data. System temperatures can be monitored using any number of tools. The coolers used on most of today’s gaming-oriented cards typically have some built-in headroom to accommodate at least some level of overclocking, but if your card or system already run hot, additional cooling may be required. Unfortunately, the nature of the 970’s memory system wasn’t clearly communicated to the public, and there’s been some drama.By definition, overclocking a graphics card means running it above its stock GPU and memory frequencies, which will result in higher power usage and heat output. The GTX 970 is slower across the board and has a funky VRAM management system where the first 3.5GB runs normally and the last 500MB is a bit hobbled, but it also costs about $200 less, and you won’t often encounter scenarios where that 500MB chunk slows things down. It comes with 4GB of VRAM and happily makes use of all of that. It’s faster than AMD’s beefiest offering, the Radeon R9 290X, while needing less power and less real estate inside your PC for its cooling system. When the GTX 980 arrived, it was Nvidia’s flagship card -with a flagship price of $550, which hasn’t gone down much since its release in September last year. These are meaningfully different cards, but we’re grouping them together because they came out at the same time. We’d recommend a 600-watt power supply for one of those, and 850 watts if you wanted to add a second one to your system for Crossfire. There’s a twist, though: The 290 also needs a lot of juice. The 4GB version can get you somewhat higher framerates, but at $240, it’s not much less than a Radeon R9 290, which has much better performance than both cards. Overall, though, it’s difficult to recommend the GTX 960, because AMD offers comparable performance and power consumption for substantially less money, at least for the 2GB version. Since they’re power-efficient, they don’t generate much heat, either, so the card can be more compact than before. ![]() But some versions need two such connections, in which case you need at least a 500-watt power supply unit-that’s the threshold where PSUs start having multiple PCIe cables. You can find versions that use the same 6-pin PCIe connection that some 750 Ti cards do. Like the 750 and 750 Ti, the GTX 960 does not draw a lot of power. If you want some benchmarks for reference, we have them in the GTX 960 review here. This card’s performance is roughly comparable to AMD’s R9 Radeon 280 or 285. It comes in 2GB and 4GB versions, with the latter costing around $240. So we sometimes refer to the cards above them as "Maxwell 2.0.” The GTX 960 is the least expensive version, setting you back around $200. While the GTX 750 and 750 Ti are technically Maxwell cards, they don’t have the full feature set, so they don’t get MFAA and VXGI. These two cards are roughly comparable to the AMD Radeon R7 265 or 270. Since these are entry-level cards, we can’t declare them as the "best," but they’re fine for 1080p gaming most of the time. And we definitely recommend the versions with 2GB of VRAM instead of 1GB, since current 3D games will happily take advantage of the additional capacity. If this is the kind of card that you can afford, we recommend going for the 750 Ti, since it will give you some extra oomph needed to hit that magic mark of 60 frames per second in your games. So that means that our breakdown will be sticking to the GeForce GTX 750, 750 Ti, 960, 970, 980, and the recently released Titan X. It has some features not available in the older Kepler generation, like Multi-Frame Sample Anti-Aliasing (MFAA), which is a highly efficient way of smoothing out jagged edges on 3D objects, and Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), which creates shadows with a degree of realism that we hadn’t seen occurring in real-time before. ![]() Then we’ll select an overall winner.įor simplicity’s sake, we’ll be sticking to the current "Maxwell” generation of Nvidia’s cards. We’ll give you a quick tour through the various choices that you have at different price points, and what the pros and cons are at each stage. ![]() For people who want a quicker breakdown of choices like which Nvidia video card you should buy, we can condense that into just a couple of pages. And that’s great, when you have the time. Some people like going through lots of pages of benchmarks, analysis, galleries of the component in various states of disassembly, forum debate, and pictures of fluffy kittens. When you’re trying to figure out the next PC upgrade you should buy, there are at least two ways to go about it. ![]()
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