Palit GTX 950 2GB StormX Dual Review

For the review today we are using the latest Nvidia 355.65 drivers which were supplied with the GTX 950 cards by Nvidia themselves. All Nvidia hardware was tested using this driver in order to eliminate performance discrepancies relating to newer driver updates. The AMD cards were all tested with the latest Catalyst 15.7.1 driver.

Unfortunately we could not gather comparison data for the AMD R7 370 graphics card. We spent more than 20 hours in the two days preceding GTX 950 launch trying to fix an issue with two samples of an identical R7 370 card, but to no avail. Instead, we decided to use an old-trusty 2GB Radeon HD 7850 card and manually overclock it to reference R7 370 speeds – 975MHz core and 1400MHz memory. Why the Radeon 7850? Because that is effectively the GCN 1.0 ‘Pitcairn' GPU upon which the AMD's R7 370 (now called Trinidad GPU) is based.

We are not saying that an overclocked Radeon 7850 is an R7 370 (there are some under-the-hood tweaks to memory speed and power management), but the results of the overclocked 7850 can be seen as a form of interpretation of rough performance levels for an R7 370 card. It is worth noting, however, that many R7 370 cards ship with a factory overclock that puts their core frequency above 1GHz. Our old Radeon 7850 simply could not push far enough for us to record performance with a 1GHz+ core clock.

Test System

• Processor: Intel Core i7 5960X ES (4.4GHz OC).
• Memory: 16GB (4x 4GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHz DDR4.
• Motherboard: Asus X99-Deluxe.
• System Drive: 500GB Samsung 840.
• CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i.
• Case: NZXT Phantom 630.
• Power Supply: Seasonic Platinum 1000W.
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional with SP1 64-bit.

Targeting 1920×1080 gamers, we would expect cards in this price range to offer the 60 FPS standard using high or maximum image quality settings. So those are the settings that we will be using in our games.

We try to paint a clear picture of the market by including performance data from Nvidia's higher-end GTX 960 and lower-end GTX 750 Ti. These cards sit either side of the GTX 950 market position. From Team Red, an R9 380 acts as the step-above comparison, while our Radeon 7850 overclocked to R7 370 frequencies gives an insight into the performance of the GTX 950's closet competitor.

Comparison Graphics cards:

• Asus STRIX Gaming GTX 950 DC2 OC 2GB (1165MHz core / 1355MHz boost / 1653MHz memory)
• Palit GTX 750 Ti StormX Dual 2GB (1202MHz core / 1281MHz boost / 1502MHz memory)
• Palit GTX 960 Super JetStream 2GB (1279MHz core / 1342MHz boost / 1800MHz memory)
• Sapphire R9 380 Nitro 4GB (985MHz core / 1450MHz memory)
• HIS Radeon HD 7850 2GB overclocked to reference R7 370 frequencies to give an insight into the R7 370 graphics card (975MHz core / 1400MHz memory)

Software:
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark
Fraps
Steam Client
FurMark
MSI Afterburner
TechPowerUp GPU-Z

Games:
Battlefield 4
Bioshock Infinite
Grand Theft Auto V
Metro: Last Light
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Tomb Raider

Game descriptions edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.

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