Gigabyte GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming 2GB Review

We know that the GM206 GPU has more headroom in it than reference or board partner speeds would suggest, so we pushed to see how far we could overclock Gigabyte GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming card.

Without increasing voltage we managed to push the GPU core clock 50MHz higher than its already high out-of-the-box operating state, resulting in a recorded GPU frequency of 1531MHz while gaming. The memory had plenty of headroom in it, pushing to 2000MHz (8000MHz effective). This is higher than the GDDR5 clock speeds that we have managed with the other GTX 950 cards tested.

It is worth noting that Gigabyte's card could only be set to use a 108% power limit by default (in both MSI Afterburner and Gigabyte's own software). I would have liked to see this limit extended, especially given the 8-pin PCIe power connector however there is the option to manually adjust the GPU core voltage for greater overclocking headroom.

3DMark and GTA V both showed healthy performance gains of around 7% using the overclocked configuration. The minimum frame rates in GTA V were also pushed past the 30 frames per second mark which could be useful for gamers with a G-Sync monitor.

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