PNY GeForce GTX 960 XLR8 OC Gaming Graphics Card Review

John Williamson / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

Currently, the PNY GTX 960 XLR8 OC Gaming is available from Novatech for £174.98 including shipping. If you reside in the US, it’s possible to procure the product from PNY’s website for $209.99. While this is a highly affordable proposition, the timing isn’t great because AMD’s RX 480 has now been released and offers similar performance to the GTX 970 in DirectX 11 games and can beat the GTX 980 in Direct 12 titles.

Overview

The graphics card’s red and black styling lends itself beautifully to most gaming systems and should compliment a wide range of popular hardware. While this particular colour scheme is overdone, the paintball finish looks incredibly unique and adds an industrial appearance to your build. Additionally, the red LEDs embedded in the fan motors look fantastic without being overly flamboyant. The graphics card is extremely lightweight and measures a mere 212mm x 122mm. This makes it really easy to install and ensures there’s no kind of GPU droop. Ideally, a backplate would have enhanced the GPU’s aesthetic design and perhaps continued the theme with a red and black cover. Despite this, everything has to be made to a cost which explains this omission.

When it comes to performance, the GTX 960 is a great product for 1080P gaming but there are better options coming in the near future unless you desperately need a NVIDIA GPU. The graphics card’s 2GB of video memory can become a hindrance at higher graphical settings and the GTX 960 consistently falls behind the R9 380. Furthermore, AMD’s upcoming RX 480 will start from only $199, offers a “premium VR experience” and will most probably destroy the GTX 960 in every benchmark. Of course, this isn’t PNY’s fault because they’ve created a superb version of the GTX 960. It’s just bad luck on their part and I can see the GTX 960 struggling to sell well once the RX 480 is released.

In terms of noise output, the graphics card’s 0dB idle mode is absolutely brilliant and allows you to browse the web and play casual games without any increase in system noise. Even when visually intense games are being run, the GPU remains relatively quiet and isn’t far off the best results we’ve encountered. Once overclocked the core reached 1396MHz and remained stable with a boost speed of 1459MHz. The memory increased to 7812MHz which combined with the core overclocks to benchmark rather well.

Moving back to performance, the GPU can still uphold smooth frame-rates at modest settings which is what we’ll probably use in the future for lower-end testing. Also, the PNY GTX 960 XLR8 competed rather well with the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 and that’s a good baseline to illustrate its competitiveness. Personally, I think PNY’s GTX 960 is a better option than their GTX 950 card due to the minor price difference. However, it’s difficult to dismiss the RX 480 which means I can only recommend this product if you have a major preference for NVIDIA hardware. Even then, the GTX 1060 might not be far off as a reaction to the RX 480.

Pros

0dB passive silent mode
Excellent 1080P performance
Generous warranty
Great overclocking headroom
Low power consumption
Stunning design

Cons

GTX 1060 is looming
RX 480 offers much better performance

“The PNY GTX 960 XLR8 is a fantastic budget graphics card when paired with a 1080P monitor and outputs good frame-rates at decent graphical details. However, the timing isn’t ideal because the RX 480 has finally been unveiled and outputs significantly better performance”

Editors-Choice