PNY GTX760 OC Review, Testing and Comparison

GPU manufacturers are hard and heavy to hit you with NVIDIA’s latest and greatest in all different flavors, and with those flavors comes a price.  Prices can sometimes get out of control so much so that many of us just can’t afford them and so we sit and dream. I was there for some time but then this fell onto my lap, courtesy of my friends at XLR8Gaming.net, PNY’s gaming community on Facebook, if you stop by let them know Iggy from Dragonblogger sent you.

PNY is more known for making NVIDIA’s Quadro series of professional video cards and they do a great job, but they also have a GeForce line of cards, namely the XLR8 series.  They offer a long line of performance cards and budget cards too; they do a little bit of everything, but let’s not lose focus on the purpose for this review.

Let’s get to the specs of this bad boy.

Specs and Features

• 1111Mhz Core Speed
  • 1176Mhz Boost Speed
• 1152 CUDA Cores Physx
• 2048MB GDDR5 RAM
  • 256-bit Memory Interface
  • 6208Mhz Effective Memory Frequency
• 3-Way SLI
• Up to 2560 x 1600 (Digital) Resolution
• NVIDIA® GPU Boost 2.0
• NVIDIA® 3D Vision
• NVIDIA® Adaptive Vertical Sync
• NVIDIA® Surround
  • Supports up to 4 concurrent displays
    • Two dual-link DVI
    • HDMI® 1.4b
    • DisplayPort 1.2
  • DirectX® 11 with DirectCompute 5.0 Support
  • PCI-Express 3.0 Support
  • OpenGL 4.3

 Check out the unboxing of the PNY Geforce GTX760OC XLR8

Even if you only have a VGA connection to your monitor, you can connect it to this card with the DVI to VGA adapter included.  The box also includes a Molex to PCI-E connection for those of you that may not have enough PCI-E connections coming from your power supply, the drivers CD and the manual.

Though the card brings only one, the video card will require 2 x PCI-E 6Pin connections.

Here are the connections on the card.  As you can see, it has 1 DVI-I and 1 x DVI-D connection then also has a HDMI and Display Port connection, so you can pretty much use any monitor.

NVIDIA has been improving its technology very steadily and has brought PNY into the game with its Kepler series of cards.  Kepler brought us a better streaming processor with SMX and with it optimizing the performance per watt, so better gaming with less of a power bill, but us gamers are not too concerned with that.  Its older sibling, the GTX660 brought some nice stuff which is important in this review but the GTX760 is a bit wiser and more experienced improving on what the 660 brought us.

One other thing to mention, is that PNY gives you 1 Year warranty but extends it to a lifetime warranty for the original purchaser but only if you register the card on PNY’s website.  Most will do 1, 2 or 3 year warranty but the fact that PNY offers a lifetime warranty speaks loads about the quality of their products.

Just in case you don’t know how to, check out my video on upgrading and installing a video card.  Towards the end, after the card is installed I also show you how to install the drivers.

Now that you have upgraded your PC, what do you do?  Why you benchmark of course and brag to all of your friends about your score?

So let’s get into a little benchmarking, but before we do, let me give you my system specifications so that you can see what I am working with and have a reference point on the benchmarks.

As you can see above, this card has some decent specs and clock speeds.  I would also like to mention I am using NVIDIA’s WHQL Game Ready Driver version 344.75.

For these benchmarks, I will be using 3DMark FireStrike, Metro Last Light, Tomb Raider and Thief.  So let’s get into the benchmarks.

While not a game, 3DMark is one of the staples of Benchmarking.  3DMark’s FireStrike Extreme test heavy tessellation and volumetric illumination, complex smoke simulation taking advantage of the compute shaders.  The Physics portion of the benchmark runs 32 parallel simulations of physics on the CPU instead of the CUDA cores, so a bit of a complete system stress test there.

The score while not the highest is very good for a decent budget GPU.  I will list the highest the card hits on each benchmark.

Next up is Metro Last Light.  This game is incredibly taxing on a system and even worse on an overclocked card.  I tested in the following configuration to tax the card and the stock overclock very highly.

DirectX 11

Quality: Very High

Texture Filtering: AF 16X

Advanced PhysX: Enabled

Tesselation: Very High

Motion Blur: Normal

SSA: On

Many people run 3DMark to test the stability of their overclocks and while it is a nice program to test a bit and generate some heat, I have found Metro Last Light to catch any instability in overclocks.  The chart shows you resolutions and scores per resolution and to the right shows you the highest temperature the card hit during the benchmark. While the scores seem very low, they are actually pretty nice for the settings involved. Not playable FPS’ by far, with the settings as high as they were set you can begin to see how well this card does.  Stay tuned though; further in the review I show you why I taxed the card and its overclock so high, aside from testing PNY’s own overclocking abilities.

Tomb Raider and Thief have much the same settings but are not as taxing as Metro Last Light.  That being said lets jump to Thief’s benchmarking.  Each test will use the settings below, only changing the resolutions.

Unlike Metro Last Light, these tests were much more playable, the lowest setting being at 24.6 frames per second at 2560 x 1440 with such high settings.  Overclocks don’t affect Thief as much but it will catch some instabilities.

Last on my list is Tomb Raider.  Each test will use the settings below, only changing the resolutions.

It seems like Tomb Raider at most any setting is very playable.  2560 x 1440 did become a little iffy, but just lower the Texture Filter, AA, Shadow Resolution and Depth of Field and you are back on solid ground with some decent FPS’.  I will also mention that the “TressFX” setting under “Hair Quality” is an AMD setting, you can Disable this feature on NVIDIA GPU’s and win back some FPS’.

Now here is where things get a bit more interesting.  We have been focusing a lot on only the GTX760 in the review, of course it is a review of the GTX760 but I did go into a little bit about the GTX660TI during the introduction.  So how does the GTX660TI compare to its newest counterpart?  Funny you ask, I have one right here to test with.  Let’s run some comparison testing to see if it is worth upgrading from a GTX660TI to a GTX760OC.  The champion will be based on the Average FPS.

Here are the specs read out’s of each card.

1280 x 1024

The winner by a very slim 4.67 FPS is the PNY GTX760 OC, a 16.2% difference.  The GTX660TI is getting a bit toasty as you can see from the temperature read outs.

 1920 x 1080

The winner again by a very slim increase is the PNY 760 OC by only 2 FPS, 10.16% higher.

2560 x 1440

The winner this time by a whopping 10.66 FPS again is the PNY 760 OC by a 47.73% difference.  This fight is essentially a big fight between two 86 year old ladies, no matter who wins it’s a pitiful fight and no one really wins but this does give you a little example of what the GTX 760 OC has to offer.  Let’s move on to Thief and see how this competition plays out.

 1280 x 1024

Ladies and Gentlemen, the fight is over and the GTX760 again takes the lead this time by a much more considerable margin at 17.3 FPS higher, 14.93% over the GTX660TI.

 1920 x 1080

This round they took it easy on each other, but again the GTX 760 OC takes the lead coming 6.9FPS higher, a 14.29% difference.

2560 x 1440

Again the GTX760 OC takes the lead at 5.9FPS, 18.79% better.

Will Tomb Raider change the GTX760 OC’s so far perfect winning streak, let’s find out.

1280 x 1024

I think the GTX760 OC at this point, might be a bit of a bully because it again takes the lead at 7.7FPS over, 10.44% over.

1920 x 1080

So here, the resolution increase, the load increase and the score increased, the GTX 760 wins again at 7.9FPS and 14.08%.

2560 x 1440

So while the GTX760 OC won again, it was only a 4.2 FPS increase, it started to feel the heat here only beating the GTX660TI by a measly 3.35%.

The heat was coming from the GTX660TI, not only because it was pretty close on all of the benchmarks but because the GTX660TI got so hot.  This is an older gen video card and a reference card at that so the reason it got so hot was it only had 1 GPU fan and has only GPU Boost 1.0. Even though the GTX760 OC is clocked higher and has a higher TDP, the dual fan design and GPU Boost 2.0 helps tons as you can see.

You would think the GTX660TI would be more quiet being that it only had one fan, but when the card was severely stressed (when it hit the 80’s) the fan would kick into high gear and sound like a jet engine.  The GTX760 get slightly louder but barely noticeable the fans are very quiet and as you can see cool extremely well.

So I have shown you how the card works on its own and how it compares to its older counterpart and remember I mentioned taxing the overclock?  Well, let’s see just how good this card really is by overclocking the already overclocked card and see what more it can do.  So back to benchmarking, this time I will list the original GTX760 OC speeds next to the GTX760 OC with some extra overclocking.

Unfortunately PNY does not have their own overclocking utility so I had to use EVGA’s PrecisionX.  It is not a huge increase, but you will notice I raised the voltages as well.  I raised the GPU by 34Mhz, a 2.97% bump and the Memory by 43Mhz a 2.70% increase and with that it raised the Boost speed from 1176Mhz to 1210Mhz, 34Mhz more at a 2.81% increase.  Not huge but let’s see what this increase does.

Let’s get back to some benchmarking.

Not too shabby, 168 points more than the standard OC version a 2.59% difference.  You will notice the temperature went down too.  PrecisionX allows you to not only change the GPU/Memory speed but it allows you to change the fan speed, by way of the “Fan Curve” button, you can put it all the way up, but I chose to make the fan speeds a little more natural.  Notice the shot of the Fan Curve Editor below.

Using the Editor, you can raise of lower the fan speed when it hits a certain temperature.  The horizontal plane shows temperature and the vertical plane shows the fan speed.  On to the next benchmark.

1280 x 1024

Only 1FPS difference here at least on average, oddly enough where we saw the best improvement was under Max Frame Rate, but let’s stick to Average.

1920 x 1080

2.33FPS better on the Extra OC, maybe I should teach them a little something, haha.  A 10.6% increase is starting to get a little better.

 2560 x 1440

This one is a bit awkward, but the standard PNY GTX760 OC seems to have done better than the Extra OC but as the can see the Max Frame Rate was still higher.  The Standard OC scored 7.66FPS faster than the Extra OC, a whopping 34.30% better.

1280 x 1024

The Extra OC steals the crown yet again, but not by a ton.  Extra OC scores 1.5FPS faster at a 2.35% increase.

1920 x 1080

A 1.5 FPS difference is not all the great, but again it was a small bump.  Even the 3.05% increase doesn’t sound too good.

2560 x 1440

The difference was barely noticeable, the Extra OC only .8 FPS increase, 2.48% better.  Now it’s time to have your Tomb’s raided.

1280 x 1024

This is tons better, the Extra OC scored an additional 14.1FPS, that’s 18.46% better than the standard OC.

This is getting a bit more interesting now.

1920 x 1080

I thought Tomb Raider was doing a better job with my overclock, but it seems like I was wrong, the Extra OC only score .1 FPS better, that’s literally nothing, a 0.18 percent improvement.  At least it looks more significant percentage wise.

2560 x 1440

1.6 FPS faster than the Standard OC a 4.28% improvement, again not much there but still better than stock.

I am sure I could have gone a little farther in the overclock, but it was only a test to see if we could squeeze a little more juice out of the card and we did.  I am sure if you wanted to go higher you could and get something a little more significant but remember the card comes factory overclocked already.

Overall, I think the PNY GTX760OC is a nice card and while it did not take a huge performance increase over the GTX660TI, it offers things that the GTX660TI does not.  Better and quieter cooling with Dual fans and GPU Boost 2.0 that not only helps the cooling, but the speed of the card as well.  Unline the GTX660TI, the GTX760 you to run Tri-SLI.

I would not suggest buying this card if you are only replacing the GTX660TI, I would suggest the card if you are upgrading from a 560 you do not have a video card at all and don’t have that large of a budget.  This is a very decent card for running games at decent resolutions without all of the eye candy, maybe just a little of it turned on.  All of this at a very reasonable price.

This is my first public GPU review, and there is another one coming up right behind it.  Please let me know what you guys think and anything you think I could improve upon to bring you guys a better review.