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Palit ships its GTX 950 StormX Dual in typical packaging for the company. A drivers CD and manual are supplied.
The card measures in at 220mm due to a slight overhang by the Palit's cooler. The cooler is a dual-slot form factor and should fit comfortably inside many smaller mATX or gaming mITX cases. A light blue colour for the cooler shroud should help to enhance a blue-themed build, although it may contradict other coloured themes.
Palit's cooler can switch its fans completely off when the GPU core runs below a certain temperature. So when you are browsing the web or even doing some light gaming, the cooler's fans enter their 0 dB mode. That is positive for users trying to build a quiet system that also has good cooling performance while gaming.
Unfortunately for many budget-conscious enthusiast who still value aesthetics, Palit uses a brown PCB rather than black. This shows up in a well-lit environment, but with white LED strips becoming increasingly popular in cases, it may be noticeable inside a build.
I do not like seeing the sticker on GPU retention bracket screws. This approach designed to prevent users from removing their cooler frustrates me – why should cleaning dust out of the card's heatsink potentially void my warranty if I know what I'm doing?
There is no backplate, as we would expect at this price range.
A single 6-pin power connector feeds the card which uses the GTX 950 GPU rated for a 90W TDP. Palit uses the power overhead to ramp up the factory-shipped clock speeds.
One SLI finger permits 2-way SLI usage. This could be an important factor for gamers who buy the GTX 950 now and may want a cheap-and-cheerful upgrade in a few months/years time.
Outputs are provided in the form of Dual-link DVI-D, DVI-I, HDMI 2.0, and DisplayPort 1.2. I think this is the ideal configuration for a card of GTX 950 performance level and price; gamers with an older secondary monitor can use VGA via the DVI-I port, and those interested in 4K have a choice of HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.2.
HDMI 2.0 support, providing 60Hz playback at 4K, is a big deal for media enthusiasts and those who may want to drive a pair of 4K monitors (primarily for work or light gaming). AMD's competing R7 370 does not offer HDMI 2.0 support, and it has not gone unnoticed by many potential customers.
The GTX 950 GPU supports usage of four simultaneous display outputs.
Palit extends the small PCB slightly past the 6-pin power connector in order to provide additional rigid mounting area for the dual-fan cooler.
Four Samsung GDDR5 chips form the 2GB of VRAM, while two empty memory chip spaces point towards Palit recycling an older or upcoming PCB design. Four power delivery phases are used and seem to be arranged in a 3+1 configuration.
A pair of 80mm fans (75mm blade-area diameter) force air through the heatsink. Palit says that the design of these fans has been learned from the design of turbojet engines (which should probably be referencing turbofan) in the aerospace industry. That point relates to the blade twist which helps enhance airflow capacity.
A solid aluminium block and fin array remove heat from the GPU and allow it to be dissipated. The design is clearly optimised towards cost-effectiveness as Palit is relying upon the conductivity of aluminium and the fin array design to spread heat across the cooler, rather than use heatpipes to transfer thermal energy.
Out-of-the-box operating frequencies for Palit's card are slightly higher than Nvidia reference values. The core runs at 1064MHz (40MHz greater), boost is 1241MHz (53MHz greater), and memory is 1653MHz (6610MHz effective – 10MHz greater). We recorded a maximum core boost frequency of 1291MHz during gaming in our well-cooled chassis.
