Lost Planet 2 demo standalone benchmark to stress the CPU/GPU.Prime95 stability test to stress the CPU.Asus GPU Tweak to monitor GPU temperatures and adjust fan speeds.Ĭlassic – Home Cinema to play H.264/VC-1 video.SpeedFan to monitor system temperatures.Windows 7 Ultimate operating system – 64-bit Fractal Design Define R5 case – ATX, stock 140mm fans.Power supply, ATX v2.2, 80 Plus Platinum, 1000W total output, 83A on +12V rail Kingston HyperX 3K solid state drive – 120GB, 2.5-inch, SATA 6 Gbps.Kingston HyperX Genesis memory, 2x4GB, DDR3-1600.MSI Z77A-G43 motherboard, Z77 chipset, ATX.Intel Core i3-2100 processor, Sandy Bridge core, dual core 3.1 GHz, integrated HD 2000 graphics, TDP of 65W.The die is exposed but surrounded by a shim, and rubber pads have been placed on the outside as an additional precaution. Contact between the aluminum base and the GPU core is facilitated by a thin layer of thermal compound. The heatsink is fairly small, not even extending to the far side of the shroud. There are two additional screws holding down a dedicated VRM heatsink. Removing the cooler is a simple matter of loosening four spring-loaded screws around the GPU core. With its low TDP, the GTX 950 requires just one 6-pin PCI-E power cable. Outputs: DVI-D, DVI-I, HDMI, and DisplayPort. The card is covered with a simple plastic shroud and is cooled by a radial style heatsink with a single 92 mm fan. The card weighs 440 grams (just under 1 lb) with the cooler accounting for 260 grams of the total. The small size and mere 90W TDP makes it an excellent option for a compact gaming PCs housed in a small/shallow case. The Zotac model is of standard width and measures just 17.3 cm or 6.8 inches, about the same span as a mini-ITX motherboard. The question is whether the cooler is up to the task, as a bum heatsink/fan could negate all the good things going for it. More importantly, it can fit in spaces larger models cannot. Clock speeds aren’t as high as most models, but it’s still factory overclocked like most cards these days. While it occupies dual slots, it’s quite short, about the same length as a mini-ITX motherboard. Zotac has two other 950s equipped with dual fan heatsinks, but this one is preferable for extremely small gaming PCs. Our first sample is the plainly named Zotac GeForce GTX 950, their most basic model with just a single fan. Currently it’s only available with 2GB of video memory but 4GB models are on the way, though it’s questionable whether the extra RAM is useful on a card of this caliber. With this downgrade in horsepower comes a sizable 30W TDP drop. It’s essentially a cut-down GTX 960 with 3/4 the number of CUDA cores and slightly lower clock and memory speeds. The newly released GTX 950 expands down to the US$150 level, giving price-sensitive users a taste of what more fortunate gamers have been enjoying. Until now, the GTX 900 series has priced out the higher end of the market, with the ~ US$200 GTX 960 as the bottom rung on the ladder.
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