Gigabyte GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming 2GB Review

The Gigabyte GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming 2GB graphics card is certainly worth serious consideration and at the price point it looks to be one of the fastest graphics cards that money can buy.

While the reference card is impressive enough on paper, Gigabyte have taken the core clock speed and cranked it significantly – therefore pushing frame rate performance into a different zone. They have increased core speeds to 1203MHz which is a significant increase over the 1024MHz reference GPU speed. The boost clock is rated at 1405MHz, but we actually saw the card hitting 1481MHz during gaming. In a less common move these days, Gigabyte also overclocks the memory by 100MHz, resulting in an effective data rate of 7000MHz for the 2GB of GDDR5.

That in itself is impressive enough, but we manually overclocked the card even further resulting in a recorded GPU frequency of 1531MHz while gaming. We also were able to push the memory clocks to 2,000MHz (8Gbps effective) – which is quite remarkable and ahead of competitor products, by a clear margin.

Gaming performance is surprisingly good. We were able to play a suite of new and older AAA titles with Ultra and High image quality settings. Grand Theft Auto V was a great gaming experience at 1080p, with image quality set at Very High, albeit with frame killing MSAA disabled. Tomb Raider was super smooth at 1080p with the Ultimate preset enabled. At the same resolution with High image quality settings Battlefield 4 managed to hold at 60 frames per second or greater – at all times. These are the kind of frame rates we don't normally expect to see at 1080p within this price sector.

Availability of Gigabyte's GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming is limited, although we did find the card selling for £147.76 at Lambda-Tek. Pricing of the higher-end GTX 950 parts presents issues currently. Many of the more expensive boards are priced too closely to GTX 960 solutions to make them compelling options when looking at the bigger picture. We saw the same thing happen with Asus' GTX 950 STRIX, which hit retail for £149 rather than the anticipated £139.

At just under £150 the card is a hard sell compared to some of the lower-end GTX 960 cards available. But as far as GTX 950 solutions go, Gigabyte's GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming is one of the best options on the market. What Gigabyte has in its favour is one of the fastest out-of-the-box GTX 950 solutions that ships with a superb twin-fan cooler and customisable lighting. Buyers wanting a GTX 950 should take note of Gigabyte's GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming.

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Pros:

• Extremely high out-of-the-box GPU core clock.
• Memory is overclocked by default.
• Quiet and effective twin-fan cooler.
• Customisable lighting.
• Well-designed backplate.
• Good overclocking headroom.

Cons:

• Higher-end GTX 950 solutions are priced to closely to some GTX 960 cards.

KitGuru says: If you have your sights set on a GTX 950, Gigabyte's GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming is one of the best options available.

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