14 DAY TRIAL // While NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 and 980 graphics cards are the big guns on the single-GPU market, they are less likely to sell than the significantly newer GeForce GTX 960. A better balance between performance and price tends to do that.
The irony here is that video cards at the level of the GTX 960 used to be considered high-end before the entry-level market was lost to CPUs and APUs with integrated graphics.
Now that low-end graphics cards have virtually no chance of selling to consumers, the mid-range has become the new low end and the other levels followed suit.
Thus, the GeForce GTX 960 which would once have been a high-end board is now a mainstream card capable of being cut down in size until it even fits mini-ITX computers.
ASUS launches GeForce GTX 960 Mini
This video adapter is short enough to not stick out beyond the perimeter of a mini-ITX motherboard, which is the smallest kind of mainboard found in PCs.
Thus, the card is the kind of video controller you might expect to see in a gaming mini PC, like the ones people take to LAN parties.
The size of the card also makes it well suited for micro-ATX platform-based computers, though full-ATX ones will do better there, since they too fit just fine.
In any event, the new ASUS graphics card, the GeForce GTX 960 Mini, has a base clock of 1,190 MHz for the GPU, and 1,253 MHz for the GPU Boost mode.
That is a significant rise compared to the reference settings of 1,128 MHz and 1,178 MHz, respectively. It goes to show that quality can trump quantity just fine if you know how to go about it.
The one asset that the board does not possess is a low profile PCB. While the length of 170 mm / 6.7 inches is nice enough, the height could not be reduced, so this is a card that won't fit inside low-height HTPCs and media center PCs.
Fortunately, that will not be too much of a problem because the card is meant for compact gaming systems anyway.
Availability
Equipped with a CoolTech fan and heatpipe-fed toroidal aluminum fin-stack heatsink, the ASUS GeForce GTX 960 Mini video board should be up for sale soon, with dual-link DVI, HDMI 2.0, and three DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. Sadly, the price and exact availability date are unknown.
