The video cards have been listed rather prematurely

Jan 14, 2015 13:44 GMT  ·  By

With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 960 graphics card now expected to make its official debut on January 22, the company's OEMs are already allowing their devices to see the light of day. That or retailers are jumping the gun.

Considering that this always happens in advance of highly anticipated product releases, we won't ask you to color us surprised, and we won't be surprised if you yourselves are not, well, surprised.

Instead, we're glad to see some of the previously reported specifications being confirmed, even if we won't know anything beyond doubt until NVIDIA makes the official announcement.

The cards we're going to look at now are the two models that Inno3D prepared, called GeForce GTX 960 OC and iChill GeForce GTX 960 Ultra.

The Inno3D GeForce GTX 960 OC

This product also bears the part number N960-1DDV-E5CNX and has 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM wired to the GM206 graphics processing unit through a 128-bit interface.

The base core clock is of 1,178 MHz, which casts into doubt the assumed standard performance of the NVIDIA reference board.

See, GTX 960 was supposed to operate at 1,178 MHz naturally, with 1,228 MHz being the GPU Boost state.

But this Inno3D card is called OC, from Overclocked, which means that 1,178 MHz is already a factory overclock. Makes us wonder how fast the stock card really is.

In any case, other than the above, the video board has three DisplayPorts, one HDMI and one DVI connector, plus the HerculeZ 2X cooler without the 4-cm side fan and direct link to the VRM section of the board. Finally, the 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM work at 7,101 MHz.

The Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 960 2GB GDDR5 Ultra

Also called C960-2SDN-E5CNX, this board is similar to the other card in many ways, all ways really, save for the cooler. Instead of the HerculeZ, the X3 AIR BOSS Ultra Cooler is utilized. You can expect it to be a bit more expensive than the OC board, but not by too much.

Availability and pricing

The Inno3d GTX 960 OC and iChill GeForce GTX 960 Ultra should start shipping on January 22 like all the others, for prices not yet unveiled but probably in the $415 / €350 to over $500 / €421 range. Main competitors so far are Micro-Star International (MSI) and KFA2, but more are sure to emerge between now and the deadline.

iChill GeForce GTX 960 Ultra
iChill GeForce GTX 960 Ultra

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Inno3d GTX 960 OC
iChill GeForce GTX 960 Ultra
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