Gadgetory

excellent what's up guys and welcome back to the channel Nvidia launched a new GPU today it is the gtx 950 now this is more of a budget card for 1080 gaming as the pricing starts at 160 US dollars today we're going to take a look at a couple variants the amp edition here from ZOTAC as well as the asus strix 950 now like many of the cards that are out there right now from board partners like EVGA MSI and gigabyte these cards both come factory overclocked and they also come with their own unique cooling solutions but the GPU at the heart of each card remains exactly the same so I'm going to start off with a rundown of the general GPU specs for the 950 then I will take a closer look at each of these two cards and then how about maybe run some benchmark comparisons to give you guys an idea of the performance and finally we'll take a look at some pretty cool new features that NVIDIA has integrated into their GeForce experience utility which allows you to stream your game to a friend's PC just via a Chrome browser plug-in and even lets you join in with them for some co-op gameplay shall we begin okay so the gtx 950 is a GM 206 based part that's the smaller maxwell chip which is the same one the gtx 960 was based on but with the 950 you get a pared down version with 768 cuda cores versus the 1024 that you get with the 960 texture units are also down to 48 vs 64 base clock is a little bit lower but the boost block is a little bit higher which is weird I guess but the memory is a little bit slower to at 6.6 gigahertz as opposed to 7 yoghurts you get 2 gigabytes of gddr5 on the 950 on a 128 bit bus and although the TDP is down to 90 watts it still pulls a bit more power than the 75 Watts it's available via a PCI Express slot so you're going to need a 6 pin peg connector from your power supply to power the card now for a look at each card I'm going to start with the zotac amp exclamation-point Edition here this is Oh Tech's top-end 950 and you'll notice it's kind of strikingly similar to their GTX 960 amp which I reviewed back in January actually because the 950 and the 960 both use a GM 206 GPU you're going to find that many vendors have actually reused their designs from the 960 which is good if you like coolers that are over built but bad if you were hoping for a teeny tiny version of the 50 like what you might have gotten within 750ti for example anyway though this card is about two hundred and five millimeters or 8.0 seven inches long and ZOTAC Scot you covered with a couple 90 millimeter fans on top pretty decently sized aluminum thin array with a couple copper heat pipes underneath and the metal and plastic shroud has a gunmetal gray finish with some nice faux carbon-fiber accents ZOTAC is keeping the pressure on other vendors by including their very nice wraparound metal back plates even on this more entry-level GPU so good on you so tech and for vital connection points you have the aforementioned six pin pegged power plug the standard PCI Express gen3 connector which remains Gen 2 compatible if you're upgrading from an older system a single SLI finger for two-way SLI support even though I don't really recommend that configuration on lower end cards and video outs including a DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 and a couple dual link DVIs note that the yellow one does have analog connections as well so you can use a DVI to VGA adapter on that if you're using an older VGA only monitor I use this card for the benchmarks so you're going to see in just a minute as I got my hands on it first and it had the higher boost clock out of these two with a baek's base frequency of 12:03 a boost of 1405 and a max operating clock of fourteen sixty seven point seven out of the box the asus strix gtx 950 very interior also looks quite nice this is also actually the first asus strix out looking card that I've had here in the studio so I hope to see some more of them ASIS went with a two fan design here much like the zotac these are 75 millimeter fans with the distinctive black and red Strix shroud all around them this is a plastic shroud which is to be expected with a lower-end GPU and the whole card is just under 225 millimeters or 8.8 five inches long there's an aluminum thinner a down there and a couple big fat eight millimeter nickel-plated heat pipes to aid with dissipation of heat from the GPU no back plate on this 950 from Asus but there is a metal support bracket to minimize PCB flex and that all black PCB doesn't look too bad if you ask me key connections are identical to the zotac version with a 6 pin peg power plug PCI Express gen3 connector single SLI finger and DisplayPort 1.2 HDMI 2.0 and a couple dual link DVIs for video outs in practice the Asus GPU temperature topped out at 70 degrees Celsius although the out of the box overclock was not quite as a aggressive as the zotac with a base frequency on the ASIS at 1165 boost of 13 55 and a max operating clock of 1430 point 2 megahertz the zotac ran a little bit hotter topping out at 73 degrees but it was running at a higher clock speed both GPUs won't run their fans at all by the way until the temperature increases I think to 60 degrees Celsius so idle you get 0 noise the coolers on these cards actually seem pretty evenly matched from what I can tell and I'm pretty confident that with some really basic overclocking you can get equivalent performance out of either of these by pushing the GPUs up to the safe 1475 to 1525 max frequency range now I'm going to move over to some benchmarks so here's my testbed configuration and please bear in mind that I'm not tuning these benchmarks down for these entry-level cards we're still at very high or ultra settings where possible and these GPUs are really going to be more comfortable at 1080 with high or medium settings I'm running an Intel 59 30k overclocked to 4.4 gigahertz 16 gigs of g.skill ripjaws for ddr4 memory at 20 666 an EVGA x99 classified motherboard a Kingston HyperX savage 250 gig SSD and a Rosewill tachyon 1,000 watt power supply all powered by Windows 8.1 64-bit sorry for the lack of AMD card representation here but I don't have an r7 370 on hand which is the nearest competitor to these two I did throw in the more expensive gtx 960 and GTX 970 both from EVGA though in order to give you something to compare to and that said here are the benchmarks okay so the benchmarks tell us that this card will give you about 80 to 90 percent of the performance of a GTX 960 also that you should stick to 1080 gaming because two gigs of gddr5 is pretty limited for anything higher and that you'll probably be more comfortable tuning the visual settings down a notch or two if you want smooth 60 plus frames per second gameplay but wait that's not all my friends in video was also very excited to share some new software based features that they've integrated into the beta version of their new GeForce experience utility the first one provides latency reduction for mobile players and this will work with the GTX 950 starting in September but should be also coming to other GeForce GPUs in the future to the supported MOBA games out of the gate our dota 2 league of legends and heroes of the storm and to reduce input lag time NVIDIA has basically removed one of the steps from the DirectX graphics processing pipeline you can only do this with less graphically intensive games like MOBAs but when combined with the GTX 950 s reduced GPU processing time the result is a significant reduction in the time between you doing something like clicking your mouse and the action actually taking place on screen they demoed this with a Frankenstein Mouse Arduino board to provide a visual cue for the click and compared it with some high-speed footage of what happens on-screen the result is that the action takes place in about 45 milliseconds versus 80 milliseconds without this technology that's a pretty significant impact for twitchy game genre like MOBAs finally there's this new in-game sharing overlay the GeForce experience is integrated into the most recent beta which gives you access to the instant replay feature that automatically DVRs up to the past 20 minutes of gameplay it also has the record feature which can capture up to 4k resolution clips at 60 frames per second and also lets you now trim down the footage and automatically upload it straight to YouTube there's the broadcast feature that can stream straight to twitch which I'm sure the xsplit and OBS software devs are super stoked about and finally there's this stream button that ties in with game streams so here's how that works so first you get the stream button then you get an email or a URL that you can email or send the URL to friend they need to be using Chrome and also have to install a browser extension for Chrome but after they do that GeForce experiences establishes a peer peer connection and lets you on your gaming computer stream your game through to your friends PC via Chrome at 7:20 resolution so they can watch what you're doing now that's pretty cool by itself because it eliminates server lag that you might get via a streaming service but Nvidia also added the ability to control the game via the remote system so you can co-op with a friend and co-op capable games like trying three even if they're across the country you can give control to your friends to help you out to get past maybe a tough spot in the game or something like that or if you're a crazy streamer like my friend Steve who does his master and minutes show on Sundays at 7 p.m. Pacific time at twitch.tv slash burial grounds I imagine this could be put to good use for forwarding game streams to other systems then compile it compiling them into a master stream or that kind of thing I'm sure there's lots you can do with it and I'm excited to see what people actually get done the remote system doesn't even need to have an NVIDIA GPU it just needs Chrome on this system you're streaming to an i3 2100 or better CPU and a decent router internet connection with recommended 7 megabits per second or better speed okay so that's the nvidia gtx 950 and let's conclude with some conclusions so first for those who really really wanted me to compare this to the lower end AMD cards that I don't have my apologies as I do not have those cards but I will put a link in the description to a wonderful guru 3d article which gives a wide array of GPU comparisons from that I can tell you that the hundred and fifty dollar r7 370 pretty much gets beat by the nine and seven err by the 950 in every test that they ran even though the 370 has four gigs of VRAM another competitor for the 950 is actually the gtx 960 because when the 950 starts at hundred sixty dollars and the Strix one cost 170 and the zotac one costs 180 at least as of today's that pricing on Newegg wouldn't you maybe consider just getting one of the gtx 960 s it's on sale for like 185 or 190 bucks because they do go on sale for that much that is something to consider now the pros list for this GPU is pretty good though as a low power card i only pulled about 285 watts max from the testbed and that's what the 15 30 K you could almost certainly get by with a 350 water maybe a 400 watt power supply and the htpc potential is very nice here since you've got quiet cards all around hdmi 2.0 support for 4k 60 Hertz plus hardware-based HD DC or h.265 decoding if you're into MOBA games or indie titles or like world of warcraft and not as graphically intensive games and you need an upgrade at this price range it's the perfect option in my opinion also you do get DirectX 12 support for a little bit of future proofing now the cons list must mention that you do need a 6 pin peg connector for this card so that makes it less of a drop-in upgrade for folks with older systems with weaker power supplies that is one of the things that made the 750ti so successful also you only get two gigs of gddr5 memory which was a limiting factor even for some of the 1080 tests that I ran but if you are considering going for a 1440 or a 4k panel any time soon I would want to beef your GPU than this if you're thinking of getting one of these though and upgrading to SLI in the future - I just I wouldn't recommend it as you'll still be stuck with 2 gigs of gddr5 effectively I know DirectX 12 might change that but until you can actually buy a DirectX 12 game I'm just not going to count that as a future so there's my review of the gtx 950 and i hope you guys learned a little bit from it I'm actually pretty excited about some of the new GeForce experience features and I think for budget builders the 950 brings some significant offerings to the table let me know what you guys think of this card down in the comments section though is anyone actually planning on picking one up also let me know which version you're going to get and what kind of system you're going to put it in whether it's a lower end gaming system or an HT PC or that sort of thing hit the like button too while you're at it but only if you enjoyed this video presentation you can also check the description for links to my store for shirts and mugs and glasses and my amazon affiliate code that you can bookmark for a future shopping sprees that's all for this video ladies and gentlemen and as always thank you for watching you