Gadgetory

loads of guys so in case you didn't hear the news NVIDIA recently gave birth to the latest member of their Maxwell GPU family the GTX 950 the new card retails for about 160 USD competing directly with AMD s r7 370 and much like its arch nemesis the gtx 950 targets 1080 gaming at high settings which is where a vast majority of us PC gamers currently stand now unfortunately I don't actually have an r7 370 on hand to conduct a proper bench off but then again a budget gamer might not necessarily be faced with the age-old question of team red versus team green for about 50 bucks more the gtx 960 brings a bit more power to the table but still falls in line with 1080 gaming so assuming you've got a full HD monitor at home and you're in the market for a geforce card does the added performance of a gtx 960 warrant the higher price tag over a gtx 950 which one do you choose well rhetorical questions ever get old these are the questions that must be answered and today i've called upon the aid of my zou tech gtx 960 and this EVGA gtx 950 super super clock to help me do just that so starting things off with a quick look at the specs we can see here that the gtx 950 uses a cut-down version of the GM 206 the very same chip found in the gtx 960 having one of its SM shaders disabled results in 33% fewer CUDA cores and texture units which is our biggest indication of the performance gap here the referenced gtx 950 has a base clock of a thousand and 24 megahertz and a boost clock of eleven hundred and eighty eight while our factory overclocked EVGA model boasts an impressive boost clock just south of 1400 megahertz apart from a slower memory clock frequency the memory specs of both reference models are identical sporting two gigs of gddr5 on a 128-bit bus however the gtx 950 only consumes 75% of the power as its bigger brother making it incredibly power efficient with its single 6-pin pci ii connector though our EVGA card rocks an 8 pin plug for additional overclocking in addition to all of the usual Nvidia technologies like dynamic super resolution g-sync and game works the gtx 950 can also advantage of the new MFA a filter which delivers image quality on par with 4x MSAA at a cost that's closer to 2x MSAA what you essentially have here is the ability to achieve good looks through low impact who ever thought anything would bridge the gap between video games in Bikram yoga other notable features include hdmi 2.0 for 4k signal at 60 Hertz and support for DirectX 12 with the feature level 12.1 now take a moment to compare this to the r7 370 s HDMI 1.4 a lower feature level and lack of racing support and the budget maxwell card begins to sound a bit more enticing now diving right into the performance of our Nvidia cards I overclocked both contenders as far as I could take them landing me at fourteen hundred and ninety five megahertz on the zotac gtx 960 and a blazing fifteen hundred and seventy eight megahertz on the gtx 950 this is undoubtedly in part thanks to e BGA's beefed-up a CX 2.0 cooler it's nice to see that maxwell retains its astounding overclocked ability with nvidia x' latest card now all tests were run with a 5820k and x99 gaming g1 motherboard at the target resolution of 1920 by 1080 using the latest game ready wickel drivers on Windows 8.1 without further ado let's queue up some soothing sounds of the ancient lute while we take a look at the benchmarks all right well I think it's safe to conclude from our results that the GTX 950 can in fact handle most of today's games at 1080p at high settings our card easily topped 45 fps in every game with the exception of hitman absolution which honestly isn't half bad considering we ran the test on ultra with 4x msaa with all the loose guarantees of the GTX 980 and 390 X being 4k ready it's nice to finally see a car that delivers exactly what it promises a smooth gaming experience of 1080 with some eye candy to boot when all is said and done the GTX 960 performed about 18% better on average than our aggressively overclocked GTX 950 that performance gain comes at a cost however about 30% to be exact so when we take a look at these raw numbers is the premium price tag of the gtx 960 really worth it I mean of course the answer will vary from user to user but I personally feel that the gtx 950 packs more bang for the buck in the long run it's no secret that the memory specs and gaming performance of the gtx 960 fell somewhat short of our expectations when it launched back in january which as of today puts it much closer to the gtx 950 than its high-end neighbor the gtx 970 in some ways this alignment puts the gtx 960 in a weird position as gtx 950 users probably won't see noticeable gameplay improvements or enjoy higher resolutions until upgrading to the likes of a gtx 970 or an r9 390 at the same time this is great news for budget gamers who now have a new means of solid 1080 gameplay at a sizable discount for this reason and many others the gtx 950 deserves all the praise and approval that the gtx 960 initially missed out on but let me know what you guys think of this new card from nvidia in the comments and don't forget to test me other like on this video if you enjoyed it before you go you can check the description below where you can buy an awesomesauce shirt or bookmark my Amazon affiliate link and use it every time you bust up it helps me a lot till next time I'm Kyle with awesomesauce Network thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'm gonna go get a haircut now because this is ridiculous it's like a chia pet