ASUS is first to market with a custom version of the GeForce GTX 950 that doesn't require an additional PCI-Express connector, so the goal of their engineers was to get the card's power draw down from around 100-110 W to 75 W. They achieved this by setting the card's power limit to 75 W, which in turn will cause NVIDIA's Boost Technology to respect this limit when selecting clocks and voltages to boost the card beyond its base clock.

After the initial announcement, you readers were worried that the card would either sit at or below its base clock all the time, or draw much more than 75 W from the slot, potentially being a fire hazard. After reviewing this card, I have to say that none of this is true; the card delivers respectable performance and boosts up to around 1200 MHz most of the time, which is 170 MHz higher than the base clock (see chart at the end of page 27). In terms of power draw, the card has hit its power consumption limit spot on. In all our gaming power tests, the card draws nearly exactly 75 watts from the slot, even while running Furmark.
Gaming performance is very reasonable, being only 3-4 % lower than the GTX 950, which still means it's just as slow as a GTX 950, which is around half as fast as a GTX 970, so you won't be able to play games at their Ultra settings with it; the card works well with more casual games or at reduced detail settings, delivers playable framerates at a reasonable price point. When looking at the power-connector-free market, this card is clearly the fastest option available, breezing past aging R7 360, HD 7750 and GTX 750 Ti models.

Fan noise is very good, even though I wish ASUS had included the idle-fan-off feature that we've seen on their other recent releases. Nevertheless, the fan is extremely quiet in both idle and load as you hear it in a closed case that has another active fan running.

ASUS is asking $155 for their "unplugged" card, which is a $15 increase over other GTX 950 cards. I find this to be acceptable if you must have a graphics card without a power connector. Everybody else will be better off by not paying the price premium for the lack of a power connector, and by looking at one of the regular GTX 950 cards instead. I'm also slightly unsure as to who would really needs a card without a power connector as nearly every PSU that's still working has a 6-pin power cable, or at least two Molex connectors you could use with an adapter; and should you find such an ancient computer, you are probably better off completely replacing it, while upgrading the CPU and memory in the process as well.
The big market for such cards seems to be the one where upgrading even brand-new, branded PCs which often come with as few PSU cables as possible to cut down on cost is often an issue - if you're building 50,000 of these, even saving a foot of cabling on each makes a difference. These same PCs often come with decent processors, but integrated graphics and a motherboard that has an empty PCI-Express x16 slot, so if you want to game with it, grab this card, and bam, its game ready.