Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 950 was released in August last year. It is built on the 28 nm GM206 silicon on which the GTX 960 is based. This is a tiny chip, and compared to the R7 370, it has a narrower 128-bit memory bus for just four memory chips on the card. NVIDIA makes up for some of the deficit with lossless texture compression tech, which improves effective bandwidth by around 20%. The sheer pixel-crunching muscle of the Maxwell architecture takes care of the rest, which creates a lot of room for future cost-cutting measures.



Today, we are reviewing the ASUS GeForce GTX 950 "unplugged", the first GTX 950 that does not require an additional PCI-Express power connector. This promises to make the card a great choice for lower-end systems that are being upgraded if you don't want to upgrade the power supply as well. I could also see this card do well in a media PC because of its low power consumption (if you have enough space for it).

ASUS achieved this design feat by lowering the NVIDIA power limit of the card to 75 watts, while keeping GPU and memory default clocks at reference design levels. So, what's gonna happen is that NVIDIA Boost clocks will be limited by power draw, which will result in less performance to satisfy those power consumption constraints. How low? That's what we're here to find out.

Price-wise, the card comes at a slight price increase, which is probably a small premium for its ability to operate without a power connector. The cheapest GTX 950 I could find on Newegg costs $140, and ASUS is asking $155 for their white GTX 950.