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Graphics cards/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

NVIDIA · GeForce GTX 900 · Desktop

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 is NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop graphics card with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, 1,024 shading units and a boost clock of 1178 MHz.

GeForce GTX 960Illustration

Drawn from this part’s own specifications. No openly-licensed photograph of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 exists, so this is an illustration rather than a photograph.

Overview

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 is NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop graphics card with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, 1,024 shading units and a boost clock of 1178 MHz. These are the manufacturer’s published figures. They describe what the chip is designed to do, not what your particular machine does with it, and the gap between those two is usually cooling. A boost clock is a ceiling rather than a promise, and how long a graphics card holds it under continuous load is the one thing no specification sheet can tell you.

Specifications

Architecture
Maxwell
Shading units
1,024

Comparable within an architecture. Across vendors or generations it is not a like-for-like count.

Base clock
1127 MHz
Boost clock
1178 MHz
Memory
2 GB
Memory type
GDDR5
Memory bus
128-bit
TDP
120 W

Board power, not measured draw. A laptop GPU's power is a range the laptop maker chooses within.

Process
Not verified
Launched
Not verified

Sources

Each figure, the label its source printed beside it, and the day it was read.

FigureAs printedSourceChecked
ArchitectureMaxwellRelease textunder GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
Shading units1,024CUDA Coresunder GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
Base clock1127 MHzBase Clock (MHz)under GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
Boost clock1178 MHzBoost Clock (MHz)under GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
Memory2 GBStandard Memory Configunder GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
Memory typeGDDR5Memory Interfaceunder GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
Memory bus128-bitMemory Interface Widthunder GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page
TDP120 WGraphics Card Power (W)under GeForce GTX 960nvidia.comSpecification page

Measured on SystemCheck: not enough runs yet. Run the test to add yours.

Compare

The 6 nearest graphics cards in the same segment, each with a published side-by-side.

Every figure on this sheet is a design target. None of it is a measurement.

Nothing above describes how a graphics card behaves twenty minutes into a sustained workload, which is where two chips with nearly identical specifications routinely diverge. A boost clock is a ceiling the vendor permits, not a rate the chip sustains, and whether it holds depends on the cooling, the case, the power profile and the room. None of those appear on a specification sheet.

We deliberately do not reduce these figures to a single score. A composite invented from specifications would look authoritative and measure nothing, and choosing the weights would be choosing the winner.