EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC 4GB Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the the EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC 4GB video card.

EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC 4GB Idle Temps:

The EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC 4GB video card has no fans spinning at idle, so the card is dead silent. Even with no fans spinning at all we found a rather impressive idle temperature of just 39C and an idle voltage of 0.9500V.

When gaming we hit 75C and the voltage topped out at 1.2120V in a room where the temperature was 67F (20.5C). Note the fan speed got up to 1081 RPM. As you can see when we were gaming the GM206 Maxwell GPU was running at 1468.1 MHz thanks to NVIDIA Boost 2.0 technology.

Sound Testing

We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

All of the cards have no fans spinning at idle, so the idle noise is the same on all of the cards. The only reason the system is above ambient noise levels is due to CPU’s water cooler fans and pump noise. Even with the fans running the EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC 4GB hit just 40.8dB, so this is a very quiet card and that will appeal to many gamers. We didn’t notice any choke noise when gaming when we tried the card in a PC case. The noise between the three cards we tested was pretty much the same at both idle and load since none of the fans spun at idle and all GPU coolers were dual fan models with low RPM fan speeds.