OCC: Regardless of base core clock, when run within the confines of the power limit and thermal profile, the GTX 950s are boosting on their own to over 1400MHz on the core to push that performance envelope. Manual overclocking allows the end user to push a bit harder and I was able to hit GPU Boost speeds of 1551MHz on the EVGA SSC, 1538MHz on the MSI Gaming, and 1569MHz on the ASUS Strix. Overclocking of the 2GB of GDDR5 memory on each card was just as fruitful, with speeds in excess of 1855MHz on each of the three cards.

Running cool and quiet in your gaming rig is all the rage now, with cards that don't cut the mustard on fan noise getting eviscerated in the online communities. ASUS, EVGA, and MSI all have put in the work to deliver zero noise solutions that make the video card an after thought when you think of the noise profile of your PC. ASUS' DirectCU II cooling solution on the GTX 950 Strix is a bit more modest than the larger cooling solutions used on the EVGA and MSI cards, and that lack of size hurts its comparative performance at both stock and overclocked settings. EVGA does a bit better with its ACX 2.0 big heat pipe solution when overclocked, but at stock speeds the low dBi BIOS keeps the temperatures up a bit higher to minimize the noise profile. The best thermals were delivered by MSI and the Twin Frozr V cooling solution. A pair of 100mm propeller blade fans with directional vanes in the fin array help keep the card running cool. Not that the EVGA and ASUS cards are hot by comparison. When you look at power consumption all three boards hit the same marks and work within roughly the same envelope.

For this launch, NVIDIA is upping the game with its Geforce Experience tool kit by replacing ShadowPlay with a tool called Share that really opens up a lot of possibilities to, in essence, share your gaming experiences. You get game optimizations for both high and low latency MOBA gaming and standard optimized profiles for a wealth of titles. During my testing, I had a chance to really try this out and I was prepared to get a dose of less than optimum eye candy with the FPS jacked way up, but found that I got great fluid gameplay with enough eye candy to make me happy. Add in the back end work with GameWorks and you have a winning combination.

HotHardware: The GeForce GTX 950 cards from ASUS and EVGA we tested, were quite power friendly. Both of the cards consumed the same about of power at idle, though the EVGA card used somewhat more under load. Both cards, however, consumed the least amount of power of the bunch.

With such low power consumption, it should come as no surprise that these GeForce GTX 950 cards are relatively quiet as well. Both cards are basically inaudible at idle over a typical CPU cooler and PSU fan, especially since their fans can spin down at lower-temps and not product any noise at all. Under load, their fans do spin up somewhat, but both cards remained quiet throughout testing.

LegionHardware: Gamers hoping for playable performance at 1080p will be pleased with what the GTX 950 has to offer, especially considering that most of the games we tested were done so using the highest possible quality settings with some form of anti-aliasing enabled.

Recently released titles such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Dragon Age: Inquisition averaged around 40fps, while older titles such as BioShock Infinite and Hitman: Absolution averaged over 60fps.

The Palit GTX 950 StormX Dual graphics card that we were supplied with ran very cool at a little over 70 degrees underload and remained whisper quiet at all times. Although it only features a basic aluminium heatsink it demonstrated excellent overclocking performance and proved that a 768 core Maxwell GPU doesn't produce much heat.

We don't expect AMD to sit around and watch the GeForce GTX 950 cannibalize the budget gaming market. If history has told us anything we expect AMD to slash pricing of the R7 370 on or soon after the launch of the GTX 950. Furthermore we expect to see a rehash of the R9 270X, which will likely be called the Radeon R9 370X. This means it will feature 1280 SPUs and consequently outperform the GTX 950, but this is of course just speculation

Guru3D. The MSI GeForce GTX 950 Gaming is one of the best GTX 950 cards we have tested. It has an impressive yet totally silent cooler. Increase fan RPM and you'll be amazed how silent the card remains and how cold your GPU will get. That adds benefits to overclocking and tweaking. This product offers proper cooling and totally silent noise levels. Combined with the rendering performance I'd call this product a capable 1080P graphics card. All boxes are ticked and that makes this a competitive product. Purchasing this product to game at WQHD / 2560x1440 is ill-advised though, 1080P is the maximum space and domain of the GeForce GTX 950. But that would be at pretty decent image quality settings. We do hope to see a 4 GB version as well though. These cards might not be the greatest performers, but we certainly like what they offer. Decent gaming performance in a cool package with interesting tweaking options and for a product in this class, very nice looks with a proper cooler. We like it, nice.

Update, the basic models GeForce GTX 950 are going to cost roughly 179,00 EURO incl. VAT and $159 USD for the US. When did entry level gaming become this expensive ?