So yeah I know, it’s starting to look a little like all we cover around here are GTX 950’s and R7 370’s. Don’t worry today is the last time. Today I’m going to follow up the R7 370 Crossfire article and see how good our two GTX 950’s perform when paired up in SLI. As with all of our Crossfire and SLI articles, this is not a review as I have already tested and reviewed both cards individually. Today is just a quick look at their performance and to find out if the 950’s in SLI are a better value than any of the more expensive cards individually. Have a great weekend everyone!

Product Names: MSI GTX 950 Gaming 2G and Asus GTX 950 Strix

Review Samples Provided by: MSI and Nvidia

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Amazon Links: MSI and Asus

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I started of my testing of the two GTX 950’s by running through our synthetic benchmarks. Here I’m able to get a good idea of the overall performance of a card or in this case cards to be able to compare against other cards with less variances like the in game benchmarks tend to have. I ran through all three of the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmarks. These benchmarks are a good representation of 1080p gaming (performance), 1440p gaming (extreme), and 4k gaming (ultra). At the performance setting the 950’s in SLI pulled an impressive 12149 score for an improvement of 84% over a single GTX 950. This was much higher than the 10137 that the two R7 370’s got in the same test and it put the 950’s up just under the GTX 980 and about on par with an overclocked R9 390. The extreme benchmark result showed similar results falling once again in between the 980 and the 390. It was the ultra benchmark results that  was especially curious about. During the ingle card testing this same benchmark gave us a peak at the memory limitations of the 950. The same issue came up when in SLI as well. In fact due to the slight efficiency loss of SLI the results were actually lower than the single card results. Its clear the memory issue is still a big limitation when trying to run extremely high resolution stuff, we will have to see if it holds back the 1440p testing later. 

The Heaven Benchmark 4.0 results weren’t held back at all though with an average FPS of 72.5, the same as the GTX 780 Ti. Considering the Crossfire issues that the 370’s ran into here I was happy to see that the GTX 950’s didn’t have SLI issues. This of course puts the results in a completely different class, well over double of the 370 crossfire results. In the Valley benchmark the R9 390’s did edge out a little performance on the 950’s and the 370’s in Crossfire were a little closer than in the previous tests but still about 6 FPS behind.

In Game Benchmarks

Next I jumped right into benchmarking in our 9 different modern games to see how well the cards in SLI would do when actually gaming. To help see the actual gaming performance and to simplify the countless number of results I like to break things down into three different FPS categories to represent perfect (60+), playable (30+), and unplayable (30-). I also split up the 1080p and 1440p results to help see the performance difference at different resolutions. To help I’m including the numbers from the Asus GTX 950 as well for reference to how a single card performed. So as you can see at 1080p the results are very clear, the single 950 did well but needed to turn the settings down on our benchmarks a little to hit the 60+ sweet spot but in SLI every single game was at or well above that mark. This is a little different than the 370’s in Crossfire considering a few games didn’t support Crossfire and we ended up with two games in the playable and one in the unplayable. At 1440 we saw an improvement as well for the 950’s but its clear that the memory bandwidth issues are still an issue here with 5 games in the playable category, one in unplayable, and three in the perfect. Oddly enough this is still an improvement over the 370’s in Crossfire due to the Crossfire issues where the 370’s individually kicked the GTX 950’s but in the single card 1440p testing.

1080p 60+ (3), 30+(5), 30-(0)

1440p 60+ (0), 30+(3), 30-(6)

When we look through the results we can see that the results in comparison to other cards are very close to what 3DMark showed us. In most cases the 950’s in SLI came in just below the GTX 980 and above the GTX 970 as well as the R9 390’s. Because of that I’m really curious to see how the numbers come out when I get into the final section and start looking at the performance per dollar.

Power Usage

This section would normally cover cooling, noise, AND power but given that we are looking at SLI performance and I have already tested and reviewed each card individually today we are only taking a look at the power consumption of the 950’s in SLI. That’s okay though because finding out how much power it will take to push two cards is a good benchmark to help plan our your original build. Even if you are only adding one card to start, it never hurts to leave room to be able to add a second card without having to replace your power supply. So in this case each card requires a single six pin power connection so for SLI you will need two total. When I tested the total power consumption I did test using both the Heaven Benchmark as well as the Valley benchmark because the newer Valley benchmark is a little more demanding and we are slowly moving over to that.

In the Heaven Benchmark the two 950’s pulled 403 watts total where the more demanding Valley Benchmark did push things up to 411 at peak. Even at 411 we are well below the 470 that the two R7 370’s were pulling in crossfire. The 950’s did end up pulling nearly the exact same wattage as the GTX 980’s that they were close to in performance so the overall setup is surprisingly power efferent. The great part is at this wattage you can still shop on a budget for your $600 budget build with a single GTX 950 and leave room to add the second card later. 

Final Thoughts

Just like in our original GTX 950 testing the 950’s when paired up in SLI dominated the AMD 370’s. The 950’s also managed to not run into any weird SLI issues to cause any slowdowns so when running at 1080p a pair of 950’s will run just about anything you can throw at it with the settings turned all the way up. Turning up the resolution didn’t see as big of an improvement though. At 1440p there was still better performance but you are still going to have to turn settings down a little to get the average frame rate up above 60 on some of the games. More concerning were the results in 3DMark, it was very clear that in the Ultra benchmark that the memory bandwidth and capacity limitations of the GTX 950’s carried over into SLI testing as well. While the cards run great together, if you try to push higher resolutions you are going to run into a wall and end up with performance at or slower than a single card. I do still think there is a lot to be said about the performance we did see at 1080p and to a lesser extent 1440p though.  

So in the end is the performance worth what it would cost to pick up the two cards? Well we saw performance at 1080p and 1440p that was above the R9 390 and just slightly below the GTX 980. Picking up a pair of GTX 950’s as tested is going to run you around $340. A single R9 390 will run about $330 and the GTX 980 about $500. Assuming you are only planning on running those resolutions the pair is actually a good value compared to the GTX 980 and in line with the performance/value we saw with the R9 390. Even the GTX 970 that they outperform by a decent amount will run you at least $20 more. What that means is the 950’s could be a good buy even for building them as an SLI rig right out of the hole. Typically dual budget card setups only become cost efficient when the second cards price drops or when you get the single card in your budget at the start and then add it later when you have money.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.