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.