NVIDIA GTX 950 SLI Graphics Card Review

Introduction Here at eTeknix, we strive to give the consumer the best possible advice in every aspect of technology. Today is no different as we bring you the SLI review of the latest budget pleaser from NVIDIA, the GeFoce GTX 950. The NVIDIA GTX 950 is the newest card to be released based on the Maxwell architecture and aimed to bring solid 1080p performance for under £150. Sub vendors went completely nuts with this card and produced some simply great options that have put the squeeze on AMD in the budget gaming segment. Now we don't really ever consider low-end options for SLI for cost effectiveness reasons, but some consumers may only have £150 now and £150 next month and want to play straight away. Because I had the choice of three different cards, the smart move would be to test the two most powerful options, the Inno3D iChill GTX 950 and MSI Gaming GTX 950. These both can be purchased for under £140 each through a wide range of retailers and work extremely well together. However, a matching set would give the best possible performance as the computer wouldn't need to throttle one card to match the others performance. That's enough of an introduction, let's find out how well this compact duo performs in the real world. Testing & Methodology Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to overview our test system. All tests will be conducted with the latest stable drivers available, with results will be taken from an average of three tests. All tests will be conducted using the highest factory setting if multiple options are available. Hardware Motherboard - Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WiFi LGA 2011-3 Motherboard Processor - Intel Core i7 5820K at Stock 3.3GHz RAM - 16GB (4 X 4GB) Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz CPU Cooler - Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 11 1200W Main Storage Drive - Crucial M550 512GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Displays - AOC U2868PQU 4K Operating System - Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit "Killawatt” style electricity usage meter wall plug Precision Gold N05CC Decibel meter Drivers Software Battlefield 4 Bioshock Infinite Grand Theft Auto V Metro Last Light Tomb Raider 3DMark Unigine Valley Unigine Heaven CPU-ID HWMonitor TechPowerUp GPU-Z Luxmark Synthetic Benchmarks During our testing, we use a range of readily available synthetic benchmarking tools which are free to download from the respective websites. We do this so the readers can download and compared to our results. Download links are contained within the "Software" subheading. Noise Everyone has their own reasonable noise level when it comes to comes to components in a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down, some want a completely silent computer. Power Consumption With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power-hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. Temperatures The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when choosing a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are extremely important. Lower temperatures are always better and with AMD and Nvidia opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account it is important that graphics card vendors use high performance cooling solutions in order to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching dangerous temperatures are now in the past but the importance of lower temperatures still remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds .We take temperature readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. We always record actual temperatures and make a note of the ambient; in the case where more than 1 GPU is used an average is created. Synthetic Benchmarks 3D Mark Throwing the duo straight into 3DMark and the graphical performance is very impressive. In Fire Strike, the performance is just enough to edge the Sapphire R9 390 to the top spot in this chart. Moving to Fire Strike Extreme and the lead is extended. Nearly hitting 6000 points here shows great promise for good performance throughout the 1440p tests in the future. This was expected, the lack of VRAM severely cut the performance down. However, even 4GB VRAM would make this a viable option for 4K. Unigine Valley Unigine Valley offers a good perspective into the relative power of the graphics card without focusing too much on playable FPS. Here the SLI combo performs very well. The gap widens slightly here thanks to the VRAM limitation, but still very strong performance on offer for 1440p. Compute Performance The two GM206 cores work well together and offer almost 100% scaling here. Battlefield 4 BF4 is a great all-rounder game to test on. At 1080p, the 950 setup provides over 100FPS and near 100% scaling; a great result! 1440p knocks on the performance slightly, but providing over 63FPS is a great feat. Bioshock Infinite Bioshock has come demanding sections which drag the minimum FPS down. These areas negatively impact SLI configurations to create poor minimum FPS scores and affects the average score slightly. 1440p is a piece of cake for this card combination to produce 76FPS. Grand Theft Auto V Grand Theft Auto proves to be a demanding game with the high settings chosen, but this provides an impressive 74FPS. 1440p proves too much for these cards and for the first time we see under 60FPS at 1440p. Metro Last Light I'm so surprised at how well these cards are actually doing, 91FPS in Metro is good going. At 1440p we get really close to 60FPS, but with some graphical tweaks a safety buffer could be increased to 10FPS. Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a relatively easy game for most graphics cards, with the SLI setup hitting 106FPS. Even at 1440p, 74FPS is achievable. Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures Noise Considering the close proximity of these cards, the fans barely spun up leading to almost silent operation. Power Consumption Considering the performance on offer here, the power consumption is comparatively low, just 264W at full load. Temperatures Even though the fans barely spun, load temperatures were quite high at 68°c. This could easily be lowered if you set a fan speed profile to 30-40%. Final Thoughts Well, I wasn't expecting that! I always thought that the GTX 970 was the SLI GTX 960 equivalent, however, these two cards have proven that they can be a worthy match at a very similar price. Alone, these cards cost under £140 which is a great price and also within touching distance for younger enthusiasts. This means that a budget builder can build a gaming computer with GTX 970 over a few months for a lower outlay; a much easier and more attainable option. The performance shown by these two cards was amazing. Okay it's not GTX 980Ti level, but for the price you really can't complain. Being able to achieve over 60FPS in most games with two budget cards is awesome, but to achieve it at 1440p is even more impressive. To compare these cards to a single card is actually really easy, they match up almost point for point with the GTX 970. When you consider that the 970 starts at £250, for some that is a lot of money to spend in one go. Two GTX 950's make for a better option to purchase over a few months and still have a usable computer. However, some will see that as pointless you are paying more to have the same amount of power, but what they need to see is that some cannot afford the outlay of £250 straight up. With the progression to higher resolutions and more demanding games, I don't see why manufacturers still produce 2GB cards. 4GB should be the new minimum with the push for 6GB and 8GB in the more premium options. Pros Extremely competitive price vs performance ratio Silent operation at low load levels Upgradable performance from just one card Cons 2GB VRAM starts to limit this configuration in some 1440p applications "The GTX 950 is the card of the people, strap two together and endlessly game 1440p with ease." Thank you to MSI and Inno3D for providing us with the review samples.