All the grunt you need for everyday 1080p gaming
Let’s face facts. No matter what k ind of gamer you are, you can guarantee that 99 per cent of the time, you won’t be buried in the latest AAA title from [enter evil megalomaniac game publisher name here]. After all, the latest games from Ubisoft and EA, while featuring incredible levels of graphical fidelity, often have as much depth as any of Michael Bay’s recent Hollywood blockbusters.
The majority of games we play aren’t system-destroying behemoths. And while titles such as The Witcher 3 or Shadow of Mordor look to be bucking that trend in comparison to the usual FPS money-grab spewed out by EA or Activision every year, they too will eventually retire, destined to sit in your Steam library for the rest of time.
Dota 2, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Rome 2… These are just some of the most popular games on the planet today. Not because they create a rip between the realms of digital polygons and reality, but because they’re accessible, because you can’t complete them in six hours. And this is the reason the GTX 750 and its Ti variants sell like hotcakes.
Outpacing the GTX 680
It’s also why, continually, these lower-end cards are actually the money-makers and, coincidentally, provide the best bang for the buck out there. This leads us quite nicely to the latest Nvidia GPU launch. The GTX 950, a graphics processor that’s not only built from the new Maxwell architecture (making Nvidia’s current lineup rebrandfree), but also quite the impressive little frame-renderer to boot. And what better way to get stuck into this review than inside of Asus’s STRIX Gaming card.
The GTX 950 comes in with a hefty 768 CUDA cores, around half that of a GTX 680, and the same amount of memory as well. Now, we know what you’re thinking: “Why on Earth are you bringing up a three-year-old top-tier graphics card? The short answer is because this card can outperform it. Yep, you heard right. Maxwell enables the GTX 950 to be overclocked to hell and back. If you’ve managed to put on your big boy pants today, you’ll find that given just a little shunt up to the maximum stable overclock, you can get performance that in some synthetic benchmarks actually outstrips that of the GTX 680. How that translates to games we’ll come to shortly, but this is one hell of a feat by any card.
But what if you don’t want to deal with any of that nonsense? (And rightly so!) Well, Asus has you covered. At stock, the Asus STRIX GTX 950 OC is clocked around 120MHz higher than the reference cards, providing you with a comfortable 7–11 per cent improvement in game. The card also features Asus’s automated manufacturing process, ensuring top-quality reliability across the range, and a noise-optimised dual-fan heatsink situated on top of the GPU, ensuring the card stays cool and quiet even while under load.
Price comparison
Unfortunately, you don’t make it away entirely scot-free. Due to how low the pricing is on these cards (in comparison to Nvidia’s other offerings), you do lose out on the rather stylish backplate found on the 960 STRIX edition.
For the price, it’s not exactly a superbudget graphics card, either. It’s currently available from www.overclockers.co.uk for an almost reasonable £150. Yet, if you were to just drop an additional £20, you could grab yourself a cleaner-looking, cooler, higher-performing Asus STRIX GTX 960.
All in all, this makes us wonder whether the 950, as a GPU, is actually worth investing in. Even on the low end, the cheapest you can grab any one of these new graphics processors is £130. That’s something that really gives us pause for thought, especially considering you still need one 6-pin power to run it, unlike its 750 brother.
Enough chit-chat, we’ll let the benchmarks do the talking. All in all, if you’re looking for a solid performing 1080p graphics card, the STRIX has you covered for all your gaming needs. – ZAK STOREY
SPECIFICATIONS
GPU GM 200 Maxwell
CUDA cores 768
ROPs 32
Memory capacity 2,048B
TDP 90W
Power requirement 1x 6-pin
Connectivity 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI, 1x DVI-I