A new mid-range graphics card that’s excels at pretty much everything
The GTX950 mid-range graphics card has now been released, amid much anticipation over the last few weeks; including a leak of the specs a day or two before the actual launch of the card. This is a card that’s designed to be value for money, without sacrificing performance, especially when it comes to 1080p gaming.
The EVGA braded GeForce GTX950 FTW (For The Win) fullsized card is designed for the everyday gamer who wants a little more from their mid-range GPU. The GM206, Maxwell powered GPU has a base clock speed of 1203MHz with a boost up to 1405MHz, both of which are 17% and 18% respectively above the reference 950, and a memory clock of 6610MHz. You’ll find 768 CUDA cores, 2GB of GDDR5 memory with a bandwidth of 105.76GB/s, and a dual BIOS to allow you to switch between differently tweaked profiles. Connectivity consists of DVI, HDMI and three DisplayPort connections, giving you a maximum of four supported displays with a maximum digital output resolution of 1096 x 2160.
Special attention has been paid to the cooling and heat dispersion of the EVGA GTX950. It uses three 8mm SHP (Straight Heap Pipes) for cooling across the main GPU and memory chips, as opposed to the usual U-shaped heat pipes normally associated with many cards. In theory, this should lead to a more efficient method of cooling – up to 6% better cooling according to the specifications provided. On top of the large heatsink, EVGA has used its ACX 2.0 cooling solution, which consists of a pair of 90mm fans with optimised swept blades, double ball bearings and low power three-phase, six-slot motor. The end result is a much lower use of power to drive the fans, a lower fan weight and improvements to the amount of air that can get to the GPU and the surrounding components. As a brief test of this, we ran the fans at the maximum speed, around 3450RPM, and recorded an idle GPU temperature of just 21°C.
There’s a lot to like about here. When fitted to a Gigabyte Z97M-DS3H, with an Intel i7-4790K at 4GHz, 256GB SSD with Windows 10 installed, and 16GB of memory, we clocked a 3DMark 11 score of 8732, which is one of the best we’ve seen from a mid-range card – and only four thousand shy of a 4GB GTX970. During that test, the GPU temperature topped at around 64°C with an average fan speed of just 800RPM.
Overclocking on the EVGA GTX950 is handed by its Precision X software, which presents a busy dashboard where you can alter the voltage, GPU clock offset, memory clock offset, fan speeds, GPU temperature target and power target across ten different profiles. With this latest version of Precision X you’re able to tweak the card’s settings to quite an accurate degree of control, and monitor the results.
The EVGA GeForce GTX950 FTW is a superb mid-range graphics card; excellently designed, pitched at the right level of gamer and enthusiast, and perfectly tweaked for the modern system. The pricing's good too: at £145 it’s an affordable and worthy upgrade to consider. David Hayward
An excellently priced and mid-range graphics card, ideal for gaming and enthusiast systems.
Specs
Base Clock: 1203 MHZ
Boost Clock: 1405 MHz
Memory Clock: 6610 MHz Effective
CUDA Cores: 768
Bus Type: PCI-E 3.0
Memory Detail: 2048MB GDDR5
Memory Bit Width: 128 Bit
Memory Speed: 0.28ns
Memory Bandwidth: 105.76 GB/s