Gadgetory

you know I'd be the first to admit that playing with high-end video cards is an awful lot of fun but I will also admit that it's not a lot of fun to sit there and constantly look at videos about products that you can't afford so today we're gonna go ahead and talk about a new product from gigabyte which is the new gtx 950 Ti extreme edition it looks an awful lot like their gaming series edition we're gonna go ahead and see whether or not this 950 deserves the actual title of extreme putting the words extreme and 950 together seems to be a little bit odd so let's go ahead and see if this guy even deserves the title the mastercase 5 and mastercase 5 pro from Coolermaster combines modularity with creativity giving you the freedom to build it your way make it yours by clicking the link down in the description now you might notice immediately on the surface this thing looks an awful lot like it's bigger brother series the g1 gaming where it's got the same act aluminum accenting here it's got the wind force logo that actually lights up here it's got the silent light that turns on to tell you that your fans are running at low speed because you know as it's sitting like this in your case you typically can't see the fans I mean it feels it like that you could see it and you wouldn't need the light because you wouldn't even be able to see the light but since it's sitting like this in most cases you always know what's going on with the card because the LED indicators here will tell you you've also got the stop light right here which turns on to tell you that your fans are not turning at all which is one of the benefits of these low power consumption cards is you can get away with idle or 2d operation or even low demanding games with completely silent operation because the fans won't even turn on until they reach a temperature threshold which typically non-demanding games won't even reach with these low power consumption cards now the wind force logo does light up and it is adjustable using the OC guru app from gigabyte where you can change the colors to between you know pretty standard colors you've got blue red yellow white of course green and then you've got purple and teal and a couple of other colors I think there's seven colors in total now for cooling again it uses the exact same fan blade design as the g1 gaming cards that was only two of them because it's a very PCB so it doesn't have three but it also has a large aluminum heatsink very lightweight though it's a very lightweight card running the length of the card actually running past the length of the card with a single heat pipe running in an S shape across the heat pipe giving you a lot more length to the heat pipe also giving you more heat dissipation you do have a small heat sink up here on the front for the vrm delivery it's not touching the main heat sink but in all of my testing so far it has not been running into any sort of cooling issues whatsoever on this card the vram is also being cooled by the heating so you have a lot of active cooling going on here for IO it's the usual suspects you've got your DVI and HDMI 2.0 and then you've got three display ports on here so for a small card like this you can hook up a lot of displays if you want to have a lot going on kind of like I do behind me over here now the gtx 950 is the smallest brother of the current lineup of maxwell based cards if we're not including the 750 and 750ti which are technically maxwell based cards but we'll just say for the 900 series the 950 is the little brother it's the it's the run running around the room annoying everybody you know saying I want to play I want to play and you're you know the big brothers are like go away go away leave me alone so the specs are pretty much according you know to the lineup so it's got 768 CUDA cores it's got a 1024 megahertz base clock and eleven hundred and sixty eight megahertz boost clock from the reference model obviously this card is pushing that much higher you've got two gigabytes of gddr5 running on 128-bit bus four six gigabit per second bandwidth on there this card right now at 179 dollars has an amazing bang bang for buck at 1080p and we'll go ahead and show you why I say that right now all right so I was kind of curious as to what exactly would make this an extreme card then the only other thing I had to compare it to so far was the EVGA gtx 950 SSC now as you can see here if we compare these two cards the 950 from EVGA is much bigger however they both have back plates they both have duel fans they have the same IO on the back or output on the back so the very similar cards although the gigabyte does have the lighting on there but other than that they are pretty much identical in terms of the features that they offer they both take 8 pin PCI Express power I mean that very they both overclocked to nearly identical frequencies same amount of RAM same Ram speed even so it was one of those things where okay what makes this thing extreme well you know I'll be honest if you saw the benchmarks right now this thing beat the 950 from EVGA in every single test even at stock speeds which were again nearly identical this thing was pulling out a couple of extra fps in every single category so I'll be honest I don't know what it is that's making this card faster but it is faster than the EVGA card you guys know I love me some EVGA so it's not like it's something that I would just throw out there but if you're looking for a small card it's lightweight it's got a backplate it's got light on it it's easy to fit in small form-factor builds and it comes with a lot of extra bells and whistles and blings that you otherwise wouldn't get in a card that's under $200 then you definitely should put the gigabyte gtx 950 extreme edition on your shortlist now I had originally planned to instead of comparing the two 950 s taking this 950 from gigabyte and putting it against the Sapphire 380 nitro card that I reviewed a few months back but it became pretty quick a quickly came apparent that that was going to be a bad idea and the reason why I say that is the only 380 that I had the opportunity to benchmark one was a loner card so I could not go back and redo the test now to see you know just for the sake of continuity if my results were the same the second time around to the card was a four gigabyte card which made it more expensive than this card so we'd be comparing two cards that are not in the same category of price where the Nitro came in at $219 and this thing comes in at 179 dollars so in order to do that test and make it properly apples to apples in terms of being price point comparison I would have needed a two gigabyte card and I don't have that so it really wasn't going to be very fair in doing that test because the price points were different the amount of VRAM was different which became apparent in all the tests the 380 nitro card was beating this card in every category hands down by quite a bit of fps so I don't know how much of that was attributed to the RAM especially at 1080p in games like Crysis 3 and Witcher which dude like the vram I just went ahead and threw that test out the window and maybe I'll try and see if sapphire will loan me a 380 2 gigabyte card maybe the solution here is I just take all of the low range cards that I have you know 960s and 950 s and 380 s and 3 70's and and we just kind of do like a budget shootout on all the graphics cards I'd be kind of fun it would take a while to do all that benchmarking but it probably worth doing but anyway guys thanks for watching today's video gigabyte 950 extreme card I think we're gonna be seeing more cards using the extreme nomenclature I think they're planning on bringing that out two more cards hopefully we'll learn more about that here in the future I'm curious as to what's gonna make if they do the extreme cards on the higher end models like the 979 89 atti then what's gonna make it different than the g1 gaming so I don't know if we're gonna see that I guess time will tell anyways I'm gonna get on out of here thanks for watching guys I hope this videos helped you in some way as you can see you don't need to blow all of your money on a high end graphics card to get a good gaming experience in games you could like battlefield 4 for instance as you saw we were getting over 70 FPS once you overclocked the thing 60 is no problem without overclocking it so that means games like battlefront will have no problems running on a 950 and of course you can always sli that later if that was your only option but anyway it's time to go guys thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video