Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 950 was released a few weeks ago, covering the entry-level price-point at around $160, right below $200, where competition from AMD is strong.

NVIDIA gave the GeForce GTX 950 a solid and cost-effective foundation in the 28 nm GM206 silicon on which the GTX 960 is also 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 immense room for future cost-cutting measures.



Today, we are reviewing Gigabyte's tweaked up GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming, which is the company's flagship GTX 950 card. It comes with an overclock on both GPU and memory and has a backplate, all for $180.