Palit GeForce GTX 960 Super JetStream Graphic Card Review

PALIT is no stranger in the graphics card industry, latest in their addition of cards is their GTX 960 Super JetStream series with higher clocks and awesome looking cooling system.

The card isn’t a big one but the packaging is huge.

Yes it is huge, with a hard plastic enclosure holding the card in place.

The package contents are
– Manual
– Driver Disc
– Power Cable
– DVI-CRT Adapter
More details at the official product page.

The card is beautiful from all angles, from the top you’ll see the brand PALIT while at the main area (refer to 1st pic) You’ll see the words “JetStream 風” of which 風 means “wind”. The shroud is held in place by screws and I think it has huge modding potential.

From the bottom you’ll see that the heatsink comes with copper heatpipes, they are only visible from the bottom which means you won’t ever see those pipes once the card is within the system.

I/O ports.

And here’s the back – the card isn’t long but Palit extended the length of the card with a plastic piece to match the length of the cooling system. It’s just too bad there’s no back plate, otherwise the card would be really grand.

On the bright side, you get LED lit fans! Yup, check out this video.

Here’s the GPU-Z for the Palit Super JetStream GTX 960.

Notice that the card some with high-clocks
– Base Clock : 1279MHz
– Boost Clock : 1342MHz
– Memory Clock : 3600 MHz (DDR 7200 MHz)

Test Setup

Benchmark

Here we go!

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Metro Last Light

Bioshock Infinite

Settings are at
2 – UltraDX11_DDOF | 2 – Custom | 1 – 16:9 | 4 – 1920×1080

PERFORMANCE SUMMARY : I don’t know what’s with both nVidia and AMD these days but we’re having cards at RM 800 – 1000 range with 2GB RAM instead of 3GB or more. 🙁 And it’s not like they’re performing any better. The GTX 960 trades blows with the R9 285, both being the somewhat “stripped down” version of their spiritual predecessors – with lower memory bandwidth and VRAM despite supposedly faster clock speed and power efficiency.

If you already have a GTX 760 or 670 from nVidia camp or R9 280X, R9 280, HD 7970 and HD 7950 from the AMD camp then the GTX 960 isn’t a card you go for unless you don’t mind taking a hit on performance. On the plus side, the GTX 960 is a card cooler than all the cards I mentioned.

I did not overclock the Palit GeForce GTX 960 Super JetStream because it’s already clocked very high and I don’t see how much gain I could squeeze out from the card, one additional thing to note is that Palit’s Thunder Master software is quite good for tweaking.

Temperature

Furmark Burn-in Test was used to stress the card. Fan settings are at Auto. Room set to ~25c.

Below is the full load details.

Power Consumption

Here’s what the power draw of the card is like. Power consumption reading was taken from the watt-meter, actual power draw by the entire system from the wall point. Seeing that it’s a 90% power efficient PSU that I’m using on the rig, the actual power draw will be estimated on the right most column.

The Verdict

The Palit GeForce GTX 960 Super JetStream Graphic Card retails at RM 949 which is just a step behind the most pricey GTX 960 in the market at RM 999. What you get is a cooling system that not only looks great but it’s also one that has the potential to be modified.

Let’s not forget that this card comes pre-overclocked, and with very high clocks too. The performance right out of the box is still better than other GTX 960 cards that I tested, cards that I pushed the clocks quite a fair bit as well.