Introduction

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 has an almost WhiteCastle Slider-like cuteness about it. It's not a particularly big product, but one that's so good at what it does at its humble price-point, and with so little power-draw and noise output, that you could be oddly tempted to buy two of them to stripe across in SLI. You can't want many of something until you've tasted one of it, so be sure to check out our single-card launch reviews:

• MSI GeForce GTX 960 Gaming
• Palit GeForce GTX 960 Super JetStream
• ASUS GeForce GTX 960 STRIX
• EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC

Those with just $199 to spare for a graphics card have the option of adding another GTX 960 in SLI. Given how much cost-cutting headroom NVIDIA has given itself with this card, you could see its price drop by several dozen percent in a couple years.

In this review, we clubbed two of the four GTX 960 cards we have with us into a 2-way SLI setup. Since most NVIDIA add-in card (AIC) partners don't have reference-design cards, we simply picked two of the best cards we have with us, lowered their clocks to match NVIDIA reference specs, and put them through our test-bench. Power-draw and fan-noise tests are, hence, not applicable to this review.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All video card results are obtained on this exact system with exactly the same configuration.
• All games are set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.
• AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.

Each game is tested at the following settings and resolutions:

• 1600x900, 4x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens and laptops today (17" - 19").
• 1920x1080, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution for larger displays (22" - 26").
• 2560x1440, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible 16:9 resolution for commonly available displays (27"-32").
• 3840x2160, No Anti-aliasing. 4K Ultra HD resolution, available on the latest high-end monitors.

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation sends you, the daughter of Ellen Ripley from the first Alien movie, onto the space station Sevastopol. Your original mission is to recover the flight recorder of your mother's ship, but Sevastopol Station has been infested by an Alien that has killed almost all of the crew. You battle your way through the station, encountering survivors while dodging the Alien hunting everyone who's left alive. The game is built on its own engine specifically designed for Alien: Isolation. It supports DirectX 11 with Tessellation, real-time DirectCompute radiosity, and shadows. The engine uses a deferred rendering model, so MSAA is not available.