ZOTAC GeForce GTX 960 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDMI DVI DisplayPort SLI Ready Graphic Card ZT-90301-10M

The GTX 960 may be the 3rd badboy down in the current Nvidia line but this is no slouch! The online reviews for this card were pretty good but comparisons were written for the 2GB version. With the additional 2GB bringing this to a whopping 4GB of onboard RAM, I run most of my games at or near Ultra settings with little lost in the way of performance. I've read complaints of frames per second dropping at higher resolutions but I think those were issues which had more to do with their computer's other components. In order to compare my results with this card, this is a list of my components: Motherboard is ASUS M5A99FX Pro R2.0, CPU: AMD 8350 8 core @4.4GHz with a Thermaltake cooling system, RAM 16GB Corsair Vengeance GDDR3 @1780 MHz, Corsair 750W power supply and an ASUS OLED display monitor. While this card is great, two will be even better so I plan to get another in a year when the prices come down dramatically and link them with their SLI bridge. On it's own I have zero complaints but as games evolve I know the extra power will become necessary and the combination should keep me satisfied for the next 5 years. As far as games go, this easily smokes the Sony Playstation 4's capabilities. This card even made my Windows 8.1 Pro look sharper! 8.1 Pro is known to make text look blurry or washed out on high resolution screens and this corrected those issues during setup. It comes with an easy to use utility program that allows for overclocking the graphics card. I didn't like it too much and since my motherboard is ASUS, I decided to use their optimization software instead "ASUS GPU Tweak II". I keep it in the preset "Gaming Mode" which sets it at a very mild but stable 105%. I've never had it overheat and the fans are super quiet. In many comparison tests I read that it was one of the noisier cards, however, I don't hear the fans at all and my case is a very free flowing Thermaltake. All in all, I couldn't be happier. On a side note, one complaint was that it did not include any stickers to add to your case, maybe the 2GB version doesn't bring one but I am happy to say that my 4GB version came with a very nice 1"x1" ZOTAC sticker that looks nice next to my other Corsair/AMD/Beats livery :)

The Good: Price/performance/watt is arguably the best on the market right now. Low power consumption. HEVC .265 + low watt Blu-Ray + low watt multi-monitor support = great HTPC and/or multi-monitor productivity GPU. Game benchmarks are solid at 1080P & it matches up well with the AMD R9 285, beating that GPU by about 5% on average in most games. However, it is slower by about 10% than the R9 280X (15% slower at 1440P due to the 128-bit vs 384-bit bus). Overall, if you don't care about power consumption the R9 280X is arguably a better price/performance GPU right now. If you want a HTPC/SFF GPU which comes close in performance while consuming a lot less power & generating less heat the GTX 960 is the way to go. In general the 960 GPU is capable of getting around 60fps in most modern games at 1080P (with obvious exceptions like Crysis 3 & horribly optimized games like AC Unity being basically slide-shows at higher resolutions).The Bad: It looks like I may have received a rare defective card. I'm seeing temps in excess of 90C (diode measured at 100C+ on the back-side of the PCB!!!) during gaming sessions which seems to cause throttling, coil whine, and artifacts. All in all, not a good combo.This makes me sad since I do really like the physical appearance & build quality of the AMP! edition. But, as cool as the HSF design looks it apparently isn't very good at keeping the temps cool. After doing a little research, excessive heat on the AMP! model is not an anomaly. Several reviews of this model show this is one of the hottest running GTX 960s on the market right now. For example, the ASUS Strix 960 has a similarly small (~8") form-factor but apparently has a much better HSF design which keeps the Strix cooled at 60C or lower even at full gaming load. Average temps on the Zotac show 80C or hotter in every review I've seen. If I exchange this for another model, I'll be going with the Strix. This is a bit frustrating since I really like Zotac designs/looks & much, much prefer their awesome customer service! The people at Zotac really are first class. By comparison, nearly every other GPU AIB has terrible customer service, including ASUS. The only other companies which have similarly good customer service are EVGA & XFX/Visiontek (if you prefer AMD GPUs). While I don't like ASUS's poor customer service, they do generally make solid products. So, based on the reviews I've read about how much cooler the Strix is than this AMP! edition it is most likely the model I'll order as a replacement. ~60C (Strix) vs. ~80C+ (AMP!) is simply too big of a heat difference to ignore.Bottom Line: It appears what happened here is I got a rare defective card in which the cooler and/or paste isn't applied correctly which results in just enough worse performance than usual to cause the problems I've seen. I'm positive that 9 out of 10 of this model should operate just fine even if they get up into the low 80C range. I also believe I may be able to fix the problem myself by applying better thermal paste (AS5) to the GPU, but I'm not sure I want to go to even that minimal effort since I have Amazon Prime & returning this one for an exchange makes more sense (I'm also unsure if modifying the card myself would void the warranty).Note to Zotac: improve the performance of the AMP! cooler on your next Low-mid-range GPU & I'll definitely be back as a customer! I've had 2 GREAT experiences in the past with Zotac customer service, so it makes me sad to have to go with a competitor's product this time.