Gigabyte GeForce GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming Review

Performance Analysis

The clock speed of this card is about 9 percent higher than the Gigabyte card we originally reviewed for the GTX 950 launch, and unsurprisingly this newer Gigabyte card is about 10 percent faster in games on average, showing the extra clock speed here is well used. That said, the pre-overclocked GTX 960 in the charts is still 10 percent quicker on average at 1080p than the GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming and the R9 380 is likewise 9 percent ahead at the same resolution. These calculations exclude the Middle Earth results because they are anomalous.


Even a heavily overclocked GTX 950 like this one is not cut out for gaming beyond 1080p. At 1440p, you'd have to make serious detail sacrifices in many games to hit comfortable minimum frame rates and with a 2GB frame buffer and 128-bit memory bus it's just not a sensible choice for anything above 1,920 x 1,080. At 1080p, however, this is a very potent card – it frequently hits the 30-60fps sweet spot with minimum frame rates, even managing 63fps in Alien: Isolation with everything cranked to full detail. One issue, however, is Middle Earth, which continues to pose problems to 2GB cards even at 1080p. While it certainly isn't a representative result (as all the other games show), it does suggest that either memory bandwidth or frame buffer size can be a fairly serious bottleneck at 1080p, and the chances of it happening is only likely to increase over time as newer, more demanding games emerge. So far, Nvidia has not released any 4GB GTX 950 SKUs.

Power consumption is very close to a pre-overclocked GTX 960, so this card is not an example of Maxwell's peak efficiency but, in fairness, it is heavily overclocked and our system power consumption was still well below 300W so it's hardly power hungry. Pleasingly, Gigabyte is definitely using a more effective cooler than we saw with its previous GTX 950 and a far less aggressive fan profile. Our GPU reached a delta T of just 43°C yet the fans were only spinning at 35 percent, or ~1,200 RPM, to maintain this, and it was virtually silent as a result. There was no coil whine or any other irritating noise coming from the card either.


Through overclocking, we managed to get about 8 percent more performance from this card, and this definitely isn't a bad result – in Battlefield 4, for example, it matched the result of a pre-overclocked GTX 960. Middle Earth had odd results again – the average frame rate saw a huge spike after our manual overclock but the minimum stayed well below 30fps. The card consumed about 20W more in this overclocked state too, and the fans had to spin a little faster to just under 1,400 RPM to keep the GPU at the same temperature but noise still wasn't an issue.

Conclusion

In a vacuum, this is a very good graphics card. Just like the Asus GTX 950 Strix, it's a great example of the GTX 950. It features the latest display connections, has a semi-passive cooler that is basically silent and effective at keeping temperatures down and it ships with the fastest available overclock and even a little boost to memory speed too.


However, when assessed with the wider market in mind, it's still difficult to justify the premium this card demands over other GTX 950s. At over £140, it's very close to the £150 pricing of GTX 960 and R9 380 cards, which are faster. Admittedly, 4GB versions of these GPUs will be considerably more expensive than £150 but the GTX 950 doesn't even have a 4GB SKU available to compare. While we really do appreciate manufacturers producing graphics cards that are solid in every respect, the additional cost at this end of the market is tricky to justify because of how sensitive the price-performance scale is. It's a difficult balancing act, and we don't think the Gigabyte GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming gets it quite right here.

Despite this being an undeniably good card, there are plenty of less expensive GTX 950s out there. Virtually all of them, by virtue of how power efficient the GTX 950 GPU itself is, will be easy to run quietly or silently and many are semi-passive too. They may not have the out-of-box speeds that this card has, but from what we've seen the GTX 950 is a potent overclocker anyway. Gigabyte's new Xtreme Gaming brand definitely seems to have a lot going for it, but we think it will be much better suited to higher end cards – hopefully we can see what it can do in that regard soon.