Nvidia GTX 960 cMP 5,1

theitsage · Jan 25, 2015

I was very interested in the recently released GTX 960 due to its power consumption specs. Picked one up this morning and it works great with the latest web driver. The GPU is EVGA GeForce GTX 960. I connect it using a single power cable from PCIe Booster A to an 8 pin plug.

My initial impression is that it's slightly faster than the R9 280x I have and uses way less power. Here are some early benchmark #s. I will have more in the next few days.

gpzjock · Jan 25, 2015

For comparison here are my GTX770 results:
The GTX960 acquits itself very well.

theitsage · Jan 25, 2015

gpzjock said:
For comparison here are my GTX770 results:
The GTX960 acquits itself very well.

Thank you for the screencaps of your GTX 770.

The 960 is running bet quiet so far. The latest web driver doesn't have the right name for this GPU yet. It only shows up as Nvidia Graphic Device. I'm hoping in the next month or so it'll have better driver.

ssls6 · Jan 26, 2015

gpzjock said:
For comparison here are my GTX770 results:
The GTX960 acquits itself very well.

Mountain Lion 10.8.5 doesn't run the benchmarks right. Tessellation is not supported on that OS.

crjackson2134 · Jan 26, 2015

I really hate to ask the question and show my ignorance, but how else can I learn?

It looks like the GTX 770 (older according to model number) is faster than the GTX 960. So apparently new/improved doesn't mean faster in this case?

Please explain why the newer model is slower.

theitsage · Jan 26, 2015

crjackson2134 said:
I really hate to ask the question and show my ignorance, but how else can I learn?

It looks like the GTX 770 (older according to model number) is faster than the GTX 960. So apparently new/improved doesn't mean faster in this case?

Please explain why the newer model is slower.

As ssls6 pointed out, the Unigine benchmarks in 10.8.5 is not the same as in 10.10. My interest of using the GTX 960 is its low power requirements. In a sense, the performance per wattage is very good in these newer GTX cards.

crjackson2134 · Jan 26, 2015

I see, so the benchmark comparison isn't valid then. Thanks for the explanation.

ssls6 · Jan 26, 2015

The first and middle digit on an nvidia card are important. For example, my gtx 680 would also pull mid 50s on mountain lion heaven 4 but around 38 on Yosemite. Based on what I see in this thread, you could say

A gtx 680 is about equal to a 770 or 960...with the later being more efficient from the smaller transistor size. A 780 would beat all three and a 980 beat the 780. I haven't seen the benchmarks but a 970 and 780 I bet are pretty close.

flowrider · Jan 26, 2015

My MVC Gigabyte GTX 780 here.

Lou

gpzjock · Jan 28, 2015

crjackson2134 said:
I see, so the benchmark comparison isn't valid then. Thanks for the explanation.

The comparison is more valid than you think, the only difference is the age of the OpenGL drivers which disables tessellation. The ultimate scoring system of Heaven and Valley factors this even though the GTX 770 gains higher frames for easier work.
As I said the GTX 960 does very well with its scores of 998 H and 1630 V and extremely well for bang per watt compared to the older architecture.

GPUboss rates them both the same and the 960 draws half the power to do it.
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-960-vs-GeForce-GTX-770

When I put Yosemite on this rig I will redo the bench and see a drop in frames too.

theitsage · Jan 28, 2015

gpzjock said:
The comparison is more valid than you think, the only difference is the age of the OpenGL drivers which disables tessellation. The ultimate scoring system of Heaven and Valley factors this even though the GTX 770 gains higher frames for easier work.
As I said the GTX 960 does very well with its scores of 998 V and 1630 H scale and extremely well for bang per watt compared to the older architecture.

GPUboss rates them both the same and the 960 draws half the power to do it.
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-960-vs-GeForce-GTX-770

The overall performance of the GTX 960 is nothing to write home about. The performance per watt is very good though.

I ran some benchmarks in Windows today. Valley score was about 1800 and Heaven was almost 1100. Very close to my R9 280x.

Another thing I noticed is that Nvidia drivers for Mac is not that far behind its Windows counterpart.

MacVidCards · Jan 28, 2015

ongnoi said:
The overall performance of the GTX 960 is nothing to write home about.

I ran some benchmarks in Windows today. Valley score was about 1800 and Heaven was almost 1100. Very close to my R9 280x.

He, he, I guess a matter of perspective. There are people with $10K nMPs running a pair of D700s that are nothing but heavily downclocked R9 280Xs. They would love to be able to have a mid-level newer card to plop in, but sadly they are stuck with the old pigs. (until we release line of eGPUs for nMP)

crjackson2134 · Jan 28, 2015

I would be interested to know what the overall best performing card is, that doesn't require power source augmentation. Would that be the 980?

ssls6 · Jan 28, 2015

crjackson2134 said:
I would be interested to know what the overall best performing card is, that doesn't require power source augmentation. Would that be the 980?

I would think so but MacVidCards would know for sure.

theitsage · Jan 28, 2015

MacVidCards said:
He, he, I guess a matter of perspective. There are people with $10K nMPs running a pair of D700s that are nothing but heavily downclocked R9 280Xs. They would love to be able to have a mid-level newer card to plop in, but sadly they are stuck with the old pigs. (until we release line of eGPUs for nMP)

In that sense, yes. A pair of GTX 960 costs around $450 retail will most definitely outperform the dual D700s in nMP.

theitsage · Jan 28, 2015

The GPU idles around 38 Celsius degrees when not much is going on. Get this, the fans stay off until the temp reads mid 60s or so. Even when the fans run during these benchmarks, I barely saw the speed past 800RPM.

AidenShaw · Jan 28, 2015

crjackson2134 said:
It looks like the GTX 770 (older according to model number) is faster than the GTX 960. So apparently new/improved doesn't mean faster in this case?

Please explain why the newer model is slower.

It's a "60", not a "70".

Your question is "why is a higher end previous generation GPU faster than a lower end current generation GPU?".

The 960 has 1024 CUDA cores, the 770 has 1536 cores. The 960 is around $220, the 770 around $600.

One third the price, not quite as fast. Seems like a good deal.

Asgorath · Jan 29, 2015

gpzjock said:
The comparison is more valid than you think, the only difference is the age of the OpenGL drivers which disables tessellation.

Which driver disables tessellation? OS X has supported this since 10.8 if I remember correctly (as part of the GL 4.1 core profile), and the Unigine tests definitely use tessellation.

gpzjock · Jan 29, 2015

Mountain Lion doesn't have OpenGL 4.1 it uses 3.2 and can't be updated without moving to Mavericks or Yosemite.

bugmenot123 · Feb 16, 2015

Just some experiences using the EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC ACX 2.0 (part no. 02G-P4-2966) in a cMP4,1:

Connected the card using two six pin power cables (just to be sure

) and the included 2x6 to 8 pin adapter.

I tried using it with Mavericks (10.9.5), which did not work (reboot loop), since the latest web drivers are from September and don't seem to support the platform (yet?).

Updated to Yosemite with old card, installed newest web drivers (343.02.02f01) and then booted with the gtx960 without problems (shows up as "NVIDIA Graphics Device 2047 MB").

Installed newest CUDA drivers (6.5.46, which curiously were not signed as opposed to 6.5.45) which made it work in Premiere Pro CS6 after adding "Graphics Device" to cuda_supported_cards.txt.

Quick benchmark for comparison:

DougTheImpaler · Feb 17, 2015

OK so here's a cMP 4,1 upgraded to a W3570 CPU with a GTX 750Ti for reference. Your 960s are quite a bit faster, but even little Maxwell does good! Yosemite 10.10.2 with the latest web drivers.

I'm also monitoring temperatures and voltages using the FakeSMC HWMonitor utility (though obviously I didn't install FakeSMC because that'd be bad on a real Mac). It shows a bunch of ghost sensors that this machine doesn't have, like CPU socket 2 and DIMM slots 5-8, but if you ignore those it seems to do a good job. With baby Maxwell and my upgraded CPU, power consumption seems to max out around 160W while the benchmarks are running. That's pretty dang efficient.

Surrat · Feb 17, 2015

These are some nice comparisons for the different maxwell cards.

Would be nice if MVC was able to offer EFI version of them all, so we have more of a price range to get our macs updated to maxwell.

MacVidCards · Feb 17, 2015

Surrat said:
These are some nice comparisons for the different maxwell cards.

Would be nice if MVC was able to offer EFI version of them all, so we have more of a price range to get our macs updated to maxwell.

970 EFI is done and will be available soon.

960 I might wait until it is named something other than "Nvidia Model" in System.

omvs · Feb 18, 2015

MacVidCards said:
970 EFI is done and will be available soon.

Great News! I'm looking forward to be able to use FileVault again.

DougTheImpaler · Feb 21, 2015

For fun and comparison, here's a flashed Radeon 7950. Startling how little Heaven is improved by a card that uses close to 2x the power. Valley's improvement is significant, though.

The 960 actually out-runs the 7950 in Heaven and basically matches Valley. Wows.

MVC if you do the 970 before the end of April I'll buy flashing service for it. My 750Ti can be upgraded to a 970 using EVGA step-up until then, roughly. Right now it's sitting as a spare, debating on the step-up.

Nvidia GTX 960 cMP 5,1

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