Cooling, Noise, and Power

For my last set of testing I wanted to look at the cooling performance of the Strix’s DirectCU II cooling as well as the overall power usage. Both help separate a decent card with a great card when comparing GTX 950 to GTX 950. The first set of tests I ran was for power usage. Here I ran through Heaven Benchmark 4.0 and Valley Benchmark to see just how much our 6 core test bench with water cooling pulled at peak, this way we can see what king of power supply you will need to run the GTX 950 Strix. In Heaven Benchmark the 950 Strix pulled a reasonable 320 watts and in the more demanding Valley Benchmark it pulled 328. This is similar to the 326 that the R7 370 pulled in the same Valley Benchmark.

Next I tested the card at 100% fan speed, 50% fan speed, and at idle to see how much noise the cooler put out. This way I had a range of what it is capable of. At idle the Strix like every other modern card turned off the fans putting out no noise at all. Because of this I have dropped the idle results from our chart to make it easier to read. At 100% fan speed I was impressed that the Strix came in as one of the quietest cards tested. At 50% the noise was even lower. All in all you shouldn’t be worried about noise with this card, short of manually turning the fans up I doubt you will hear it at all.

For my last test I run through Valley Benchmark and let it run until the card reaches a temperature and stays at it. Here the 950 Strix leveled off at 69 degrees. This is in the middle of the pack because this is where most of today’s cards are programed to aim for temperature wise. This keeps the noise down as well by not turning the fans up until it is needed.