MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2G Review
MSI was shouting about their ‘Gaming App’ on the back of the box, so I thought I would take a look! It isn’t quite there yet, as there is an annoying startup guide that seems to pop up every time I boot into windows, which has buttons that look… Misplaced? I don’t know. Anyway, the app itself is quite cool, the little frost symbol, when pressed, turns both fans on for around 60 seconds in order to cool the GPU down, should you feel it needs it. You can monitor the clock speed of the GPU and can, by clicking one of the three buttons, overclock the chip from around 1GHz to 1.2GHz. The two tabs on the left are quite interesting. If you have a card with more LED features than just a white logo on the side, you can vary the colour of it from here, but for this card specifically you can set it to flash, pulse, breath or just be on or off (like a normal person… haha).
The test system we used was our new test bench for all GPU, heatsink and storage test bench, which performs just about as well as my personal rig (FX8120, 16GB RAM, OCZ SSD and Asus Crosshair V Formula board.), as most games only utilize dual or quad cores, and having 2 powerful cores is apparently as good as 8 slow cores. As usual we tested 5 different benchmarks with the card, Grid 2, Bioshock Infinite, Unigine Heaven, Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3. We may be adding far cry 4 to that list, but since we don’t have the 980’s or 970’s about, we wouldn’t have much to compare it to – so don’t hold your breath! See the graphs on the next page, feel free to click them to see the full 1080p image.
