GTX 960 4GB or 970?

[Weak1ings]

My father is looking to upgrade my sibling's PCs to GTX 660s, I happen to own one and he is willing to buy it at full price ($120-150) as it is on Newegg. I need some helpful insight though...
Lets assume +$50 for the 4GB version and similar improvement as the 760 2GB vs 4GB.

In short for the moment:
$200 for the 2GB 960 $80- $60
*$260* for the 4GB 960 $140- $110 \____$90 diff.
$330 for the 3.5GB 970 $210- $180 /
^That lack of lists

+33% performance from a quick comparison of 960 2GB vs 970
Is 33% performance worth 300% more effective expense?

So far it seems like the winner to me is the 960 2GB with the effective cost of $60 vs 3 times that but now we get to the stuff I will be combining it with:
ASUS p5K PRO (1x16 PCI-E 1.0) No SLI
8GB DDR2
600W PSU
Q6600
2TB WD Caviar Green Drive

CPU aside, can the GTX 960(assume 2, then predict 4GB) run Skyrim with ENBs at 60+ fps?

I am upgrading from a GTX 660.

 

[sz0ty0l4]

I would not compare the 2 cards like that. the gtx 970 runs newest(2014,2015 and upcoming) games on1080p ultra with 60 fps easily most of the time. with the 960 you are limited to medium textures and medium settings because of vram size and bandwidth. There is no point in buying the gtx 9604gb version because the bandwidth and process power is not enough for 4gb vram anyway...
However in this special situations i'd say go for the 960 2gb because your cpu is a 2core so you couldn't take advantage of the 970 anyway...
I would hardly recommend to upgrade your cpu to an i5, if you are looking forward to play modern games aswell.

 

[Gam3r01]

The 970 doesnt cost 3x the 960. That would place the 970 at 600 dollars, or more.
That being said, the 970 is the way to go in terms of performance. The 960 is a good budget card, if your budget is large enough, get the 970.

However, your processor is weak. I wouldnt bother with such a high end card on that system.

 

[oskerw]

I think you should go with either the 960 2Gb or 970, because 4 Gb on the 960 which only has a 128-bit bus doesn't make much sense to me.

 

[sz0ty0l4]

Actually now that i've checked your motherboard properly i would recommend keep using your gtx 660 and upgrade your motherboard and cpu instead. A newer GPU will not give you better performance anyway. You should really really consider buying a new asus motherboard and an i5 cpu if you can afford it, then you can start thinking about the GPU again...

 

[Weak1ings]

How about the limitations of PCI-E 1.0? I've read somewhere that it might be limiting my 660 (I noticed that it hadn't) and anyways, as for the CPU If anyone else wants to know, The Xeon E3 1231 V3 is the best alternative to an i5 you can make. If one doesn't OC you cannot go wrong.

I suppose the only way we can tell if the 4GB 960 doesn't matter is with time and benchmarks... And people gone mad with Skyrim Mods. Maxwell is a different beast than Fermi or Kepler and might be able to use more Vram as it does with CUDA... Thank you for your suggestions! I think i'll go with the 960 2GB after seeing if the 4GB does ANYTHING AT ALL We've seen that despite a 128-bit interface the 960 can perform faster than a 256-bit GTX 670. Perhaps Maxwell is a wrench thrown in to change all our ideas. VRAM is the primary issue I have with the GTX 660. Bottlenecking is rare for the games I play too... It's surprising how such an old Processor can still serve me so well.

I'm sorry about that confusing "Effect price" stuff... It was a case specific comparison of the cost of cards to myself. Compare it to a "Rebate"

 

[mctonyc]

I would not compare the 2 cards like that. the gtx 970 runs newest(2014,2015 and upcoming) games on1080p ultra with 60 fps easily most of the time. with the 960 you are limited to medium textures and medium settings because of vram size and bandwidth. There is no point in buying the gtx 9604gb version because the bandwidth and process power is not enough for 4gb vram anyway...
However in this special situations i'd say go for the 960 2gb because your cpu is a 2core so you couldn't take advantage of the 970 anyway...
I would hardly recommend to upgrade your cpu to an i5, if you are looking forward to play modern games aswell.

Actually you are wrong on one thing. The Q6600 is actually intel's first quad core. I know i've owned 2. 2.4ghz, can run overclocked at 3.0 on normal cooling without a problem. ( not saying it's anything modern lol, i sold a setup about a year ago for 400 euros ( about 550$ at the time ) which had 8gb of ddr2 an oc'd q6600 @ 3ghz, a beatup gtx 470, and some p5xxx i don't remember it was so old, i think p5n sli or something, and re used the guy's case and power supply lol .... ).

 

[PRASHANTH_TRO]

Would gtx 960 4gb bottleneck my i7 3700? I've dh77eb mobo. I'm yet to buy a gpu. I saw a post on gamernexus. thinking to go for any one of the below GTX 750 ti, gtx 660 or gtx 960 4 GB version. http://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/1905-gta-v-pc-fps-benchmark-graphics-cards

 

[jediTT]

the 4gb gtx 960 is a gimmick, id get the 960 2gb version

 

[skeptic pete]

the 4gb gtx 960 is a gimmick, id get the 960 2gb version

Actually who ever said the GTX 960 4gb is a gimmick doesn`t know beans about video cards. I haven`t found a game I couldn`t play. It only pulls 400 watts. You`ll need a bigger power supply with those others and they also create more heat. The reason for so many negative reviews is these so called "techs" don`t have the knowledge to be installing components.

 

[Gam3r01]

Nobody said it didnt work.
Also, it dosent pull 400w. It pulls 125W and the 970 only pulls 180W.
4GB is a gimmick. You would run out of graphics horsepower before hitting a Vram limit.

If youre going to call someone wrong, better make sure youre right.

 

[jediTT]

Nobody said it didnt work.
Also, it dosent pull 400w. It pulls 125W and the 970 only pulls 180W.
4GB is a gimmick. You would run out of graphics horsepower before hitting a Vram limit.

If youre going to call someone wrong, better make sure youre right.

This guy understands ^^^^^^^

I didn't say the GTX 960 was bad, it's a great card especially for the price point. The 4GB VERSION of the card is a gimmick made to make people buy it while thinking OMGZZZZZZZ 4GB MUST BE BETTER THAN 2GB

 

[SimonEyez]

The MSI GTX 970 Gaming http://www.amazon.com/MSI-GTX-970-4G-Gra... is what I have and highly recommend it. The GTX 960 is considered a mid level card and the 970 is considered to be almost a high end card. The 970 is a much more powerful card overall.

 

[Guest]

The 970 doesnt cost 3x the 960. That would place the 970 at 600 dollars, or more.
That being said, the 970 is the way to go in terms of performance. The 960 is a good budget card, if your budget is large enough, get the 970.

However, your processor is weak. I wouldnt bother with such a high end card on that system.

Completely agree. When my hard drive died in my primary Core i7 940 desktop, and while waiting for the arrival of a new SSD to replace it, I removed my video card and placed it in my old dual core AMD X2 5800+ system I use as a backup. Because of the cpu limited to just two cores, I had to change the settings of the game I loved to play from high to minimum and it would still lag - it was almost impossible to play my game.

That's where I learned that while it might be true that the video card affects games the most, that isn't always true - the cpu matters, too, with 2 cores or less. The differences in games between a dual core and quad core cpu can be huge. The video card I was using for both computers was my GTX 550 Ti 1GB (due to power supply limitations). Worked great for my game in my Core i7 940 but not so in my AMD X2 5800+. I ended up leaving that card in my AMD system and putting a GTX 650 Ti in my Core i7 desktop. I will be building a new X99 based Core i7 5930K computer with a GTX 980 soon to replace my aging, primary system.

Imo, anyone wanting to play video and cpu intensive games should own at least a Core i5 cpu or whatever is equivalent to that on the AMD side.

 

[ChrisKlein]

Nobody said it didnt work.

4GB is a gimmick. You would run out of graphics horsepower before hitting a Vram limit.
If youre going to call someone wrong, better make sure youre right.

Absolute hogwash. Its depressing with what selfconfidence such ignorance is spread

The small 128bit bus of the GTX 960 4GB (compared to 256-bit on the GTX 760) is offset by Nvidias new colour compression engine and the 7 GBps GDDR5 memory.
The fewer CUDA cores to the GTX 760 are offset by the cards higher clock speed. Core Base Clock (OC) 1241MHz Core Boost Clock (OC) 1304MHz.

On GTA V on high settings with only some of the eyecandy toned down the GTX 960 4GB gives very decent framerates for 1080p gaming while making use of more than 3,5 GB of VRAM > unless the GTX 970 whose last 512 MB are low frecuency RAM the GTX 960 4GB has full speed 4GB VRAM and can make efficient use of it.
Besides it is DX12 ready and another unique feature of the 960 is its new video engine that supports (HEVC) video decoding, unlike the 970 and 980 which only support encoding. This makes the 960 a great choice for home theatre PCs, 4K video can be decoded at low power.

Conclusion: GTX 960 4GB is a good card for 1080p gaming and has enough horsepower to run GTA V between 70-80 fps on high settings with MSAA set to 0. (Almost never use MSAA or SSAA anyway...only drains all the ressources for very little image improvement)

 

[How To Be A Loser]

Don't buy a 4GB 128bit unless SLI is the thing for you, the 128 bit will also bite you in SLI but 2x GTX 960 4GB are decent in SLI