KFA2 GeForce GTX 760 EX OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

Another week goes by, and Nvidia launch another graphics card, as we've seen recently with the GTX 780 and 770. Today however sees the more wallet friendly GTX 760 which is said on the grapevine to be the last Nvidia GPU launch for 2013, but as we know with rumours, it's just a matter of seeing what the future holds. When Nvidia launch a card, they sometimes provide reference samples, but for the most part, they rely on their partners to manufacture their own creations and sometimes that may mean us getting a sample with a unique cooling solution or pre-overclocked speeds, or in today's case from KFA2; we get the benefit of both. It's been a while since we've worked with KFA2, but after discussing through the launch with them, we find the GTX 760 EX OC landing in our offices, offering us a pre-overclocked GPU and a custom cooler design that we originally saw on the GTX 660 when that launched. Based on the overclock speeds that KFA2 have managed to secure on this card, we hold high hopes that we should see performance very close to that of the GTX 770, but of course there is only way to find that out, and that means throwing the card on our test bench and seeing what it can do. Of course, we have a few other things to take care of first, consisting of taking a look at the packaging on offer, before delving into the design and aesthetics of the card. Once this is out of the way, we will look at how KFA2 have pushed this card beyond stock figures, before jumping into the performance straight out of the box. Also, wanting to squeeze the very best performance from the card, we will be overclocking it even further than what KFA2 have, and if previous 700 series GK104 counterparts are anything to go by, we should see some really high numbers here today, so lets get straight into it and see what magic treatment KFA2 have given the GTX 760 graphics card. The box is typical of what we expect from KFA2 with some extreme branding. We find the main features being highlighted and the model name taking prominence to the right. The EX OC sticker indicates to us that this card is clocked past Nvidia standard speeds. Inside is a dual Molex to 8-pin PCI-Express connector, a dual Molex to 6-pin PCI-Express connector, VGA to DVI adapter, driver installation disc and a brief user guide. The KFA2 GTX 760 is nothing short of beautiful. Utilising the same cooler than made the GTX 660 EX OC famous for them, we find a sleek, metal shrouding encompassing the majority of the card with its waves and stylish flare, it will look fantastic inside any system. We can see that two large fans help to push air across the card, and beneath a large aluminium heatsink with a heatpipe design covers the core and memory. The cooler is separated into different parts with the fans protruding out slightly to blend in with the metal shrouding as it ripples across the card. Some KFA2 branding is clear on the cooler and each part of the shrouding is joined by small screws which can be loosened and the cooler taken apart. The two large fans include a smoked fan blade design and include KFA2 branding. They seamlessly float above the heatsink allowing easy cleaning if they get clogged up with dust, which is something we've known KFA2 to incorporate into their design with the flexibility of keeping the card looking in its best state. Keeping with the cleaning theme, we find the top of the car including a screw which can be turned, allowing you to clear the card due to the design of the cooler being split into pieces. Another unique feature is the PCB which includes slots throughout, which I can only assume is to help exhaust hot air away from the GPU core and memory chips. Two SLI connectors are situated in their usual location, for those wanting to try out some multi-GPU technology by use of 2 or more cards assisted by the Nvidia drivers to get even more performance. Moving along the card, we find two power connectors, the first being a single eight pin PCI-Express power connector, and the second being a six-pin PCI-Express power connector. Lastly finishing things up with the rear I/O and the display connectors, we find the card as you'd expect to take up two expansion slots in your case, as well as featuring ventilated cutouts to help expel air out of the rear of your chassis. Connector wise, we find a DVI-D port, DVI-I port, a HDMI connector and a full-size DisplayPort connector. With a reference Nvidia GTX 760 being clocked at 980MHz, we find the KFA2 card coming in with quite a hefty overclock at 1059MHz. This also increases the boost clock from its stock 1033MHz to 1111MHz. Memory speeds remain the same at 1502MHz and all other specs conform to the Nvidia reference figures. The card comes packed with 2GB of GDDR5 memory which is more than suitable for the most current games. IF you do however need more, KFA2 are releasing a SKU based around 4GB memory with all of the same clock speeds. The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results. Test System: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Intel Core i7 3960X 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Corsair H100i Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 Dell U3011 We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Aliens Vs Predator Dirt Showdown Hitman: Absolution Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Hardware used: Plug-in electricity usage monitor Sound level meter Software used: 3DMark 11 3DMark 2013 HWMonitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark 3.0 Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. "The new 3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware. With three all new tests you can bench everything from smartphones and tablets, to notebooks and home PCs, to the latest high-end, multi-GPU gaming desktops. And it's not just for Windows. With 3DMark you can compare your scores with Android and iOS devices too. It's the most powerful and flexible 3DMark we've ever created. Fire Strike is our new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today." Heaven is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system's potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game. Dirt Showdown is a video game from Codemasters and is part of the Colin McRae Rally games revolving around a tour of events to compete in allowing you to win money and prizes to spend on new cars and upgrades as well as unlocking new events and races. The game uses high resolution textures and AA settings to simulate dust particles, terrain and damage to the vehicles. Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix and is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series. The game runs on the Glacier 2 game engine and includes high levels of anti-aliasing, DirectX 11 technology, lighting effects and depth of field technology. Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics-intense games on the market. Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure game based around Wei Shen; a Chinese-American police officer going undercover. The game utilises DirectX 11 features as well as high quality intensive reflections and high-resolutions textures. Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it's necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. Measuring temperatures is all about being consistent therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again. As we mentioned, this card comes pre-overclocked straight out of the factory, and from the performance we've seen, it certainly has an edge, giving some really strong performance considering its price point. With this in mind, we wanted to see how far we could push the card beyond that and with a stock GPU core of 1059MHz and memory clock of 1502MHz, we were pretty confident that it could be taken quite a bit further. To get started, we fired up MSI Afterburner and pushed the power limits to the max and proceeded to individually push up both the GPU core clock speed and memory clock speed. Once the maximum was found for both, we applied them together and though we had to tweak the clocks slightly to get them to work together, we ended up with some fantastic overclocks. From its already pre-overclocked speed of 1059MHZ, we managed to push it to 1296MHz giving us a 22.37% increase, and the memory from 1502MHz to 1901MHz giving us a 26.5% increase and an effective speed of 7.60Gbps. We knew that the GK104 was a fantastic core to overclock, and these results clearly show that to be the truth. To see how much more true performance the card gives with our new overclocks, we went back into 3DMark 11 to see how things had changed, and as you can see the initial score of 2928 points was increased with thanks to the overclock to 3520 giving us a 20.2% increase. As I mentioned earlier, it's been a while since we've had a play with anything from KFA2, but it's clear to see that nothing has changed, and they still are a top industry leading brand who do things slightly differently. They don't believe in following the standard and instead would rather wait a little while before releasing something special with a custom PCB, unique cooling design and crazy factory overclocks, and that's worth waiting for. Style wise, I'm very impressed to say the least with a unique design that doesn't follow in the footsteps of Asus and MSI, we find KFA2 sticking to their roots with the GTX 660 cooler that helped drive sales for them. Our sample as you may have noticed says 600 series on it, but we have been assured that sales stock will not feature this, and it's purely due to ours being an early review media sample. The aspect that I love of the cooler and that really stands out to me, is that it can be cleaned with ease, and this is something KFA2 have focused on for years and it separates them from the rest and that's a good thing, as in this day and age, you need to be different or go home, and KFA2 decided to be different, so kudos to them for that. Performance straight out of the box is stellar and saw some really strong results across the board with certain tests seeing improved scores over a reference AMD HD 7970 which as we know retails for around £300, which is quite a bit more than the MSRP on this card. Other benchmarks saw performance close to that of the GTX 670 overclock and GTX 770 giving fantastic performance as long as the price is right, but we'll get around to that in a minute. One key area that we were excited to see was hoo far the GK104 core could be pushed, and this actually surprised us slightly as we was expecting good things, but nothing like we saw today with some huge numbers on both the GPU core and memory clocks. The increases were absolutely amazing and the performance in 3DMark 11 of 20.2% is a real impressive number to say the least, and we can only assume that the patented cooler that has been strapped upon this card has helped assist the overclock by providing good airflow and keeping temperatures to a minimum. We also saw that the acoustics on this card and the temperatures at both idle and load were impressive too and with power consumption similar to that of the GTX 660Ti OC, KFA2 can take some appreciation for that too.Priced at £227.99 from Overclockers UK, it's actually under the price of an AMD Radeon HD 7950 in certain cases, but as we saw from the performance straight out of the box, the GTX 760 EX OC from KFA2 performed a lot better and in some cases, performed better than the Radeon HD 7970 which is priced at £300 as we mentioned. Keeping all of this in mind, the GTX 760 EX OC certainly does give amazing value for money and is fairly quiet at the same time, making it tick the right boxes in all areas, especially when you consider how far it can be pushed by overclocking, and this will help boost performance even further. Looking back at our 3DMark 11 overclock score, it would easily put this card well above a 7970 Matrix Platinum from Asus, which is an expensive card in its own right.With that said, if you are after value for money and want the complete package, then KFA2 have it waiting for you, and with a good solid price point and unique cooling solution, you'll be hard pressed to find a better card for your money on the market today. Pros Unique design Cool and quiet Fan cleaning system is welcome addition Hefty overclock straight out of the box Two SLI connectors Stellar performance Huge room to push the clocks further Good value price point Cons None eTeknix Says: The GTX 760 is as of writing this the newest graphics card on the planet, and straight away it is offering amazing performance for the money. KFA2 have realised the potential of the card and managed to push things further, giving even better bang for buck and increasing the performance to rival AMD. Thanks to KFA2 for providing this review sample.