EVGA GeForce GTX 760 SC 2GB Graphics Card Review

Remember the days when it felt like a requirement to shell out at least $400 for a graphics card in order to get an “excellent” gaming experience? I do. Not long after Techgage launched in 2005, I picked up a BFG (rest in piece) GeForce 6800 GT for about $400. That sucker sure did get hot, but it gave me the gameplay experience I was looking for. Not long after, I picked-up EVGA’s GeForce 7800 GT, and as evolution would have it, it too had the ability to give me the graphics performance I was looking for.

Today, though, I can honestly say that if I weren’t so spoiled with high-end graphics cards, I’d be able to get by on a $250-ish offering without crying about it (though admittedly, the 1440p resolution does favor beefier models). Today’s options are simply powerful, and EVGA’s GeForce GTX 760 Superclocked is a great example of that.

At the time of this article’s posting, NVIDIA’s GTX 760 retails for about $250, with EVGA’s Superclocked model carrying a well-deserved $10 premium. It’s “well-deserved” not only because of the clock boosts, but because of the use of EVGA’s ACX cooler, which as we’ll see later can make a big difference in temperature when compared to the reference model.

With its $249 SRP, the GTX 760 best competes against AMD’s Radeon R9 280, a card I haven’t yet had the chance to take a look at. However, it’s as if AMD sensed that I’d soon be posting this review, because I was shipped that very model last week. As I have an over-flowing queue and this article has been overdue as is, I decided to push this through now and follow-up very soon with my look at AMD’s card to see how both compare head-to-head.

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves: Take a look at the photo above, and soak in what is EVGA’s ACX cooler. This is the first card I’ve been able to take a look at with this cooler, and after testing, I’m left impressed. It’s a double ball-bearing cooler that EVGA says features an increased heatsink volume of about 40%. Because of the high-quality fans, the company claims that the cooler will last an average of 12 years.

At the back of its GTX 760 SC, EVGA’s included dual DVI, an HDMI, and DisplayPort connections.

At the other end of the card, we have the power connectors; 1x 8-pin, and 1x 6-pin. At reference clocks, a GTX 760 can get by with dual 6-pin connectors, but because of its overclock, EVGA’s deemed it more suitable to configure one of them as 8-pin. This is the kind of thing that makes NVIDIA’s Maxwell-based GTX 750 Ti look so amazing – that card is roughly half the card the GTX 760 is, but it doesn’t require a power connector at all.

Included in the box are a couple of stickers, a case badge, and the driver CD. The last item is somewhat moot since you’ll always want to grab the latest stable driver off of NVIDIA’s website, and EVGA’s Precision software off of its website.

The GTX 760’s reference core clock is 980MHz; EVGA’s Superclocked boosts that to 1072MHz (with a 1137MHz boost). This particular card leaves the memory clock alone, at 6008MHz.

As mentioned above, the GTX 760 is best-compared to AMD’s R9 280, but as of the time of this article’s publishing, I didn’t have one of those benchmarked. That will soon be remedied, and you can expect a follow-up to this article in the next week. To make up for that lack, I do have a comparison to NVIDIA’s reference GTX 760.

With that said, let’s take a quick look at our testing methodology, and then dive right into the results.