Zotac GTX 950 OC Review: High Performance On A Budget

Zotac GTX 950 OC Review: High Performance On A Budget

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We review the Zotac GTX 950 OC!

We’re PC gamers at heart, so we know the pain of having to shell out cash for new gear once our old hardware can’t hack it in newer games anymore. That goes doubly true for graphics cards, and while most of us would love to have GTX 980 GPUs beating in our home rigs, not all of us have that much cash to burn. Thankfully, NVIDIA has us covered – their GTX 950 line of graphics card promise to give gamers full HD gaming at a great price, slotting nicely into the same spot where their previous GTX 750 Ti once was. Today we’ll be taking a look at Zotac’s interpretation of NVIDIA’s GTX 950 hardware, and see if it makes good on NVIDIA’s promise.

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Zotac’s GTX 950 OC GPU is pretty average as far as physical size goes, and should slot neatly into most people’s gaming rigs without any problems. It’s a hair smaller than the GTX 750 Ti that it’s replacing, though that shouldn’t be a big issue as far as PC builds are concerned.

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Zotac’s GTX 950 OC sports two cooling cans as well as two copper heatpipes and plenty of heatsinks to draw away heat from the GPU when operating at full load. What’s nice about the GTX 950 OC from Zotac is that it’s virtually silent operation – even under full load during gaming and benchmark tests using 3DMark, we never heard the tell-tale sounds of a fan operating at full speed.

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Getting into the nitty gritty of the hardware, Zotac’s GTX 950 OC sports a core clock of 1102 MHz and a boost clock of 1279 MHz. It has 768 CUDA cores, and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. There’s two DVI ports as well as an HDMI and DisplayPort. It consumes around 90 watts of power. The GTX 950 OC uses a single six-pin aux power connector in order to function.

The GTX 950 is a second generation Maxwell architecture, built with efficiency in both power consumption and performance. It’s supposed to be superior to the GTX 750 Ti, and has the same 150$ price tag (thereabouts) that the 750 Ti first debuted with.

We installed the Zotac GTX 950 OC in our aging gaming rig, but not before running 3DMark on the previous ASUS GTX 750 Ti that has been our gaming mainstay for around a year. We’re posting the results of both the Fire Strike and Sky Diver benchmark below. Here’s our system specs:

  • Intel Core i5-2500K processor
    8GB Kingston DDR3 RAM
    ECS H67H2-I

Obviously our gaming rig is getting a little long in the tooth, but since we’re just comparing GPU results that doesn’t really matter too much. Anyway, on to the benchmarks:

GTX 750 Ti
GTX 750 Ti
GTX950 1
GTX 950
GTX 750 Ti
GTX 750 Ti
GTX 950
GTX 950

As you can see, there’s really a marked increase in the framerates and scores of the GPU tests between the GTX 750Ti and the GTX 950. In the Fire Strike test, the score gap is very noticeable – 3980 points for the GTX 750 Ti vs. 5503 points for the GTX 950. The lead just increases with the Sky Diver test – 12243 for the GTX 750Ti vs. 15222 for the GTX 950.

Benchmarks are well and good, but how does Zotac’s GTX 950 OC fare in a game like Fallout 4?

The wasteland never looked this good.
The wasteland never looked this good.
Blackhawk Down!
Blackhawk Down!
We hate Mirelurks with a passion.
We hate Mirelurks with a passion.

With the resolution cranked to high and all details set on ultra, the game managed to give us an overall FPS reading of around 40 FPS, with a high of around 50 FPS and a low of 30 FPS. That’s pretty good, since Fallout 4 isn’t the most optimized game out in the market today. You can probably increase those framerates to about 60 FPS if you turn the details down to med, but for most people 30 FPS is perfectly acceptable. Considering that the GTX 950 is aimed at budget gaming builds for gamers that primarily play MOBA games, the performance of the GTX 950 is more than adequate for a gamer on a budget.

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Verdict: A good bang-for-the-buck card for gamers on a budget

Searching around Tipid PC, we found that the same Zotac GTX 950 OC edition graphics card that we tested was going for as low as Php 7,800. That’s a pretty good price for a card that performs as
well as it did, which should be good news for gamers on a budget.

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