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.
