Gainward Phantom GLH GeForce GTX 960 2GB Review

Final Thoughts

Price

The Gainward Phantom GLH Geforce GTX 960 2GB has a MSRP of $210. Seeing as that is $10 more than the reference model, you would only expect minimal gains, but Gainward has piled in the features and technology into this model, making this an extremely attractive buy, even compared to other non-reference models. In the UK, Scan Computers are stocking this model for £174.98 + delivery, giving it a slight increase in price over a stock base model, but considering it includes a pre-factory overclock, one of the best coolers on the market and cherry picked parts; we think it’s well worth the extra.

Overview

Using this graphics card has been a delight. Silent in the testing computer, even at full load; the PSU fan was still louder. I love the fact that you can take out the fans independently to clean. One thing that surprised me about this graphics card though, the actual heatsink is very small when compared to cards like the Sapphire Vapour-x, Trixx or Gigabyte Windforce x3, yet it still yields a much lower temperature. Maybe other manufacturers should take note and reverse mount their fans under the heatsink, even if it’s a prototype.

With all good, there has got to be some bad points. Generally when you progress down (or up depending on your view), you expect to have a noticeable gain over the previous technology. During my testing, the GTX 960 and GTX 760 we’re switching places or even matching each others performance; that is however, a GTX 960 series flaw, not an issue with Gainward. A specific part I didn’t like about the Gainward package was the ExperTool. The interface looked great, but trying to do any overclocking was a nightmare. The sliders were too small and close together to really understand what you were doing. I resorted using MSI Afterburner and Asus GPUTweak to do the final overclocks as these have a much better input system.

If I was to change anything with this card, it would be to utilise 4GB. Even though we have yet to test a 4GB card, I can only speculate from the comparable 1080p and 1440p performance that this card could perform better at 4k if it had that little extra VRAM to boot. I would also change the input method on the ExperTool, to either larger sliders, up/ down arrows or even numerical input off the keyboard. Other than that, this has been a very pleasant test. Hopefully in the future, NVIDIA will release new drivers to get the most out of these amazing little cards.

Pros

• Ingenious cooling solution
• Removable fans for cleaning
• Hand picked, top performing components
• Silent operation, no need for passive operation.
• Amazingly low power consumption
• Competitive price vs performance ratio

Cons

• Poor ‘next generation’ performance, hopefully to be ironed out with new drivers
• Attractive, but poor user interface in ExperTool.

“Those on a tighter budget should really consider the Gainward Phantom GLH GTX 960 2GB. Easy on the eyes and the pocket, and it games very well at the most common resolutions 1080p and 1440p.“

Thank you to Gainward for providing this review sample.