Cooling, Noise, and Power
For the last bit of my performance testing O change the focus and turn to things that are important when picking out your build parts like cooling and power usage. The cooling and noise tests are also a great way to compare the performance between cards that have the same GPU like the Asus 950 and the MSI 950 that I am testing today. To start my testing I went with the overall power consumption. To test this I load the card using Heaven Benchmark and the new more demanding Valley benchmark and note the highest peak wattage our entire test bench pulls. Given our test bench is on the high end of overall wattage draw itself this is a great way to see what to expect for in game power draw if you go with this card. As always some games will pull more than others and if you run things like furmark you can really push the limits, but I would prefer to see a more real world number. So how did the MSI perform? Well in our Heaven numbers it pulled 308, this is 12 watts less than the higher overclocked Asus card and 15 watts less than both of the R7 370’s. In the Valley test the result was a little higher at 319, but it was still 9 watts less than the Asus GTX 950 and 10 watts less than the Asus R7 370.
Next for noise testing I turn the fans up to 100% and then 50% and test their noise output. In the past I also included idle testing but with things like MSIs Zero Frozr, that this card has, most cards don’t even turn the fans on at or near idle anymore. The MSI 950 Gaming 2G falls into the middle of the pack at 100%, two decibels above the Asus. Oddly enough at 50% fan speed things really quiet down and the MSI is actually slightly quieter. The louder performance at 100% fan speed is I’m sure related to the two MSI fans being MUCH larger than the fans on the Asus Strix.
My last test is simple and to the point, here I heat the card up in Valley Benchmark and record when the highest temperature reached while it loops through the benchmarks. The large cooling fans on the MSI really came in handy here with it peaking at an impressive 64 degrees. This is 5 degrees less than the Asus GTX 950 and even more below both of the R7 370’s.
