Overall and Final Verdict
So today we went over the GTX 950 and the new features that Nvidia is introducing to their drivers and software. Beyond that I went through and broke down the GTX 950 Strix and found out how well the new card performs. Going into this review I mentioned the new cards place in the market, at $159 for a standard GTX 950 it is direct competition to the R7 370 and just like the 370 it is right in the price sweet spot for being the ideal card for budget ($500-$600) builds. With that in mind, how did the card perform? Well first the overclocked Strix really impressed me in all of our synthetic and in game benchmarks when testing at or near 1080p. Given that is the resolution most people game at (especially people on a budget), that performance is very important. We did see the numbers drop down below the R7 370 when the resolution or textures went up higher than the 128 bit memory bus could handle though. In other words don’t expect to pick this card up and be playing anything and everything at 1440p or 4k, but at 1080p you should be able to toss anything you want at it.
Given the relatively low hardware demands that both league of Legends and DOTA 2 have this card is great for people who mostly focus on their MOBAs. This is why Nvidia spent time working on lowering the response time from when you click to when the click shows up on screen.
The Strix performed especially well in the noise testing as well. Obviously it runs completely silent under low loads because the fans don’t even turn on. But I was impressed with the numbers with the fan turned up just as much. The smaller fan size surely helps with that but Asus did also introduce a new fan blade design as well that helps keep things quiet and give good air flow.
Really the only issue with the GTX 950 and with that the GTX 950 Strix that I tested are the limitations on the memory side of things. But frankly if lower performance at a resolution that you wouldn’t be running on a card of this caliber is what you have to take to get great performance at 1080p I will take it. While the R7 370 that I tested yesterday performed well, the GTX 950 Strix did even better and it did it at a price point just under that of the overclocked R7 370 that I tested. The official MSRP of the R7 370 is still $10 less than the GTX 950, but having seen the performance numbers between the two I’m curious if they won’t take the price down slightly or maybe introduce a proper R7 370X to fill in the gap.
Live Pricing: HERE
