Zotac came out with one budget graphic card that’s designed for most types of gamers out there. While there are actually quite a number of GTX 950 video crads out there, Zotac basically made their GeForce GTX 950 with cooling and power consumption as a priority.
The card looks pretty simple, fairly small in build with nothing fancy nor outstanding physical features. That’s to be expected of a budget GPU but Zotac added a few subtle features where it mattered the most.
This variant of the GTX 950 comes with 2GB of fast DDR5 RAM with 768 CUDA cores. It has a core clock speed of 1089MHz with a Boost Clock speed of 1266MHz.
The GTX 950 is basically the cheapest card in NVidia’s latest line-up of GPUs with a price point that ranges around $150. The ‘budget’ label can be an understatement because that GTX 950 can actually do quite well.
This second-generation Maxwell is more efficient that its predecessor and, therefore, has more optimal power consumption. The GPU has a total of 2.9 billion transistors packed in the 227mm chip with a combined 6 Graphics Processing Unit (NVidia disabled two of the core in order to differentiate bit with the 960 and make it cheaper). In a way, the GTX 950 is a crippled version of the GTX 960 with only 75% of the cores running.
The design is streamlined with 2 slim fans which offers almost zero noise during idle time. There are ample number of ports at the back — 2 dual-link DVI, one HDMI 2.0 and a DisplayPort 2.0. This allows you to support up to 4 concurrent display which is already an over-kill for many PC users. The GTX 950 also supports DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 1.2 and HDMI 2.0.
Zotac GeForce GTX 950 specs:
NVidia GeForce GTX 950
2GB DDR5 RAM
128-bit memory bus
HDMI 2.0
DisplayPort 1.2
Dual-link DVI
NVidia G-Sync ready
Microsoft DirectX 12
NVidia GPUBoost 2.0
NVidia Surround
NVidia SLI ready
OpenGL 4.5 support
OpenCL support
For those who are fond of MOBA games, the GTX 950 should provide noticeable responsiveness or better performance especially with DOTA 2 at 1080p resolutions. The 2GB RAM could sometimes be restrictive but for most MOBA games, and at its price point, this should be enough.
With a TDP of 90 watts, Zotac recommends at least 350 W or higher system power supply. For a retail price of around $150, the GTX 950 is already capable of a lot of games (more so if you’re a DOTA 2 addict) and some more.
We will be building a test rig and put the GTX 950 to the test and see how much power we can really squeeze out of this card. Stay tuned for that.
