Asus & MSI GTX950 Face Off

Introduction and Technical Specifications

| Source: nVidia Price: Author: Tom Logan

Introduction

Some of us are old enough to remember when a low-range graphics card was sufficiently wheezy that buying one was an admission you're going to be spending your days playing Freecell. Those days are long behind us, with the range-topping cards having so much power it's scarcely believable, which has the additional drip-down effect of providing us with fantastic, affordable models.

The GTX650 was probably the first truly usable nVidia card at the value end of their product range, and the GTX750Ti has so much performance that we still recommend it to those seeking affordable gaming. Today's review, an ASUS GTX950 Strix and MSI GTX950 Gaming 2G, has much to live up to with the bar already set high from the GTX750, and the current 9xx series of cards dominating performance charts.

These are designed to bring 1080P gaming to the masses. Combining low cost with low power draw and wrapping it all up in a package that should be capable of handling even the latest titles, the audience for the GTX950 is matched only by our eagerness to see how it fairs against its predecessors.

Test Setup and Clock Speeds

The two cards, the MSI on the left and ASUS on the right, are very closely clocked. As we'll see in the graphs the ASUS manages to squeeze a little more from the nVidia GPU Boost 2.0 technology, although both are incredibly evenly matched. 2GB of GDDR5 might not seem much in these days of 4 and 6GB graphics cards, but given the resolution at which these cards thrive, 1080P, it's plenty. With only 768 shaders, an increase of 128 over the GTX750Ti, it certainly has the horsepower potential to better the previous card, although with 75% of the CUDA cores available to the GTX960 we don't think it will get close to the current champion of affordable GeForce gaming.

ASUS GTX950 Strix

MSI GTX950 Gaming 2G

Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.4GHz

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme

Corsair Dominator Platinum 2133

Corsair AX1500i

Corsair Neutron GTX

Corsair H100i

Windows 7 x64

1 - Introduction and Technical Specifications 2 - Up Close - ASUS Strix 3 - Up Close - MSI Gaming 4 - Power Draw and Temperatures 5 - 3D Mark Vantage 6 - 3D Mark 11 7 - 3D Mark 8 - Assassin's Creed Unity 9 - Alien Isolation 10 - BattleField : Hardline 11 - Bioshock Infinite 12 - Company of Heroes 2 13 - Crysis 3 14 - Far Cry 4 15 - GTA V 16 - Hitman Absolution 17 - Metro : 2033 and Last Light 18 - Sleeping Dogs 19 - Tomb Raider 20 - Unigine Valley 21 - Watch Dogs 22 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Next»

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