Synthetic Benchmarks
While real world gaming benchmarks are essential, but they sometimes don’t provide the cross reference one needs to compare their own current equipment. We’ve chosen two more benchmarks that are both free and provide you a good snapshot of how this card will upgrade your experience compared to what you have right now.
3DMark11
The GTX 760 may seem like it’s not doing well but 3DMark11 puts more of the video cards’ resources to work. Naturally, the cards with the higher memory, higher memory bit rate, more shader processors, and matching frequencies outpace the GTX 760. This is still a respectable score against so many factory overclocked cards.
Heaven 3.0 Demo
With the higher detailed settings, Heaven beats just about any GPU down pretty hard. But even here, the GTX 760 keeps up with the GTX 670 OC which has better resources on tap, but a much higher price tag as well. It all seems to come down to frequency and bandwidth which is right up there on the GTX 760.
Thermal, Power, and Noise Evaluation
There are couple things that I’d like to point out about the GTX 7xx Kepler series video cards. The maximum temperature threshold seems to be 80C on all the cards. The GTX 770 and 780 gradually worked their way up close but didn’t quite reach it in previous testing. However, when they got close, the fan speeds just about doubled. They definitely doubled on the GTX 760 at just under 35dB. Even with the new fan speed stabling technology built into the software to more gradually bring up the speeds.
That said, the batch of cards all took longer to get close to 80C mainly because they all have substantial coolers. The GTX 760 has a smaller cooler that doesn’t have all the metal bits that help, plus higher frequencies, and quickly reached 80C. In other words, the card gets hot fast making me wonder if we’ll see many “overclocked” editions with a reference cooler strapped to it. When idle or working just with desktop (2D), the card idles at 31C and isn’t easily audible unless you get close. Power consumption wise, the GTX 760 drew about 166 watts overall.
Final Thoughts
After all the 3D benchmarks ended, it was apparent that the NVIDIA GTX 760 is a very serious $249 US starting price GPU. It offers all the latest NVIDIA features that should easily support any upcoming game engines in the next couple years. It’s a very nimble 2GB video card with the heart of a beefier GTX 670 (without the price tag). The card will definitely offer a noticeable jump in performance even over the already awesome GTX 660 Ti cards. Especially in the higher end games that take advantage of extremely detailed graphics and immense maps. It’s safe to say that this should be a Battlefield 4 friendly video card when the game finally launches later this year.
Some of the things that I found a little concerning is that fact that the card gets 80C hot very quickly. I would recommend buying only GTX 760 factory overclocked cards that have substantial GPU coolers especially if you live in hotter climates. Manual fan control like that available on ASUS GPU Tweak or EVGA Precision X is very helpful for cooling down the card at the top of the range.
Still, at the current starting price of $249 US, it’s only a little more than the GTX 660 when it launched. But now you get a far more capable GPU in the GTX 760 that is ready to take on future titles. If you are looking for a serious bang for buck card, I highly recommend the NVIDIA GTX 760 as your next gaming GPU at this price point.
Pros
- Best cost efficient performer
- Very good performance
- Surprisingly quiet at load
- A good 550 watt 80Plus PSU will suffice
Cons
- Gets hot quite quickly
- Requires manual fan control to stay around 75C or less
- Manual control means more noise
Overall Rating: 8.75 / 10.0
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