Conclusion

Gigabyte’s GTX 960 G1 Gaming is one of the best, if not the best GTX 960 graphics card on the market. It uses high-quality components, a six-phase power design and a great 300W capacity cooler. By looking at the G1 Gaming you would hardly assume it belongs to the GTX 960 series. The G1 Gaming uses two 6-pin power connectors, creating the illusion of a high-end graphics card. The Maxwell GPU is extremely power efficient and even though this is a factory overclocked card, it only needs two 6-pin power connectors to keep going and support the extreme clocks.

Nvidia could have made the GTX 960 faster with a wider memory bus and more than 2GB memory, but it has other products to cover these market segments. In any case the GTX 960 is a great gaming card for gamers who tend to use 1080p resolution with cranked up visual effects. Some less demanding games can be played at 4K resolution, or 1600p. When playing MOBA games like League of Legends, you can also use DSR tech to render the frames at 4K and down-sample them to 1080p for a better visual experience.

The Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming 2GB graphics card comes with a 114MHz factory overclock that raises the GPU base frequency from 1127MHz to 1241MHz. A number of factory-overlocked GTX 960 cards ship with even higher clocks, but the G1 stands out with high Boost clocks. They are made possible thanks to BIOS optimization, excellent cooling and a good power system. Our overlocking efforts did not yield very good results in terms of high GPU-Base clock, but the Boost clocks crossed the 1550MHz mark. Aside from the relatively high price, there is another thing we did not like – the stock clocked memory. Should you choose to buy the G1, we suggest you increase the memory clock.

We really liked the G1 Gaming, but we must admit it is a little bit overpriced. For the extraordinary design of the G1 Gaming you have to pay a €35 premium over Gigabyte’s card, GTX 960 Mini, which is currently the cheapest available GTX 960 in Europe with a price tag of €193. In this price category €35 makes a big difference, but this brings you silence all the time, faster performance with high Boost clocks out of the box, and of course great looks.

If you are interested in Nvidia’s GTX 960, we can recommend the GTX 960 G1 Gaming, although it does not shine in terms of value.