Zotac’s new GTX 950 offers a unique blend of performance and style
First impressions are always important, and the ones I got unpacking this video card were great in a way that many other pieces of technology fail to achieve.
Even compared with some very expensive designs, the Zotac GTX 950 AMP! feels like a precisely tooled piece of high technology engineering. Sporting what Zotac has branded as ‘Exoarmor’, the whole outer shroud of the card is metal, and it’s gorgeously finished.
As a more affordable option to the GTX 960, the GTX 950 was always going to be less powerful, but the Zotac GTX950 AMP! answers the critical question about how much – and surprisingly it isn’t a huge amount.
Looking at the specifications, this card is built around the same Nvidia GM206 GPU, with exactly the same number of transistors wired to the same amount of GDDR5 on a 128-bit-wide memory pathway.
It’s just that some of those transistors are likely to be twiddling their silicon thumbs, because the shader units are down to 768 from 1024, although it still has 32 ROPs.
To differentiate the stock further, the core GPU and memory clocks are also reduced. Or they would be had Zotac made its card use stock settings, but it’s an AMP! model, so it's boosted the core to 1203MHz – higher than the GTX 960. And similarly, the GDDR5 memory is operating at 1755MHz, and not the 1653MHz of a standard GTX 950. That delivers a total memory bandwidth of 112.3GB/s – sufficient for very high resolution gaming and even multi-display fun, should you want to do that.
Running World of Tanks 9.10 on my Core i5 work rig, the card can easily maintain 50fps at a resolution of 2560 x 1440, with all quality settings at the highest level.
On my Core i7 LGA 2011 testing rig, this card achieved a score of 6,524 using 3DMark Fire Strike – shy of the Zotax GTX 960 AMP! by less than 400 or about 5.5%.
In other tests, the difference was less than 5%, and against a stock GTX 960 those scores would be even closer, if not almost the same.
That’s better than the previous generation GTX 760 and at least 10% more than a stock GTX 950. For those wondering if pre-overclocked cards are worth it, the answer is a definitive ‘yes’ with this design. When a card offers more than a 10% price boost for less than that much of a price hike, then it’s worth having.
There are two potential potholes in my path to recommending this card, and the first of those some very cheap R9 285 cards that it’s competing with. They’re marginally quicker in most tests and cheaper, although conversely they use more power, requiring dual PCIe six-pin power lines.
Another potential problem is DX12 – or rather the odd discrepancy that seems to be developing between AMD and Nvidia regarding which architecture is better for this API. Whereas Nvidia has been ruling the DX11 roost, it appears that might not be the case with the new DX12 API that’s in Windows 10. At this point, this is all moot, because there aren’t any DX12 games, and there won’t be many for some time, but it’s a point worth considering.
I should also mention that under some circumstances, mostly prolonged gaming, the card can also get quite noisy. It wasn’t like the police helicopter that hovers over my house far too often, but it was noticeable. Once the game action abates, it soon gets quiet again, which probably draws attention to when it isn’t totally silent.
When you’re using the card for general 2D desktop work, the fans often stop entirely, when the GPU is 60ºC or below. Oddly, the card hardly broke 70ºC while gaming, so there's some room to lessen the fan RPM without the hardware getting overheated.
Overall, I liked this card for a wide range of reasons, rather than one headline feature.
It takes a single PCIe power line, the fans entirely stop when you’re not gaming, and it delivers plenty of video performance for the price and the watts. It’s also made to a quality level that pleases me, even if some might accuse it of being over-engineered.
When you combine the performance, power efficiency, cost and the excellent build quality, the Zotac GTX 950 AMP! becomes the pre-overlocked version of this series to want – and a singularly more practical card than some of the high-end designs above it. Mark Pickavance
A video card that runs as good as it looks.