The Gigabyte GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming serves as the company's new flagship GTX 950 model, which comes highly overclocked out of the box to a base clock of 1114 MHz, with a large boost range that results in clocks of up to 1493 MHz without a manual overclock thanks to NVIDA's Boost technology. Memory has been overclocked as well, which provides additional performance benefits. Overall, at 1920x1080, the card is 12% faster than the GTX 950 at reference clocks. This means the card is only 3% slower than the GTX 960, 6% behind AMD's R9 285. Compared to other GTX 950 variants, this board shares the performance throne with the ZOTAC AMP! Edition. The GTX 950 is a great option for 1080p gaming, especially when overclocked.

Gigabyte's cooler uses two fans that sit above a single heatpipe that's twice the length of a normal one and makes direct contact with the GPU's surface, making it a well-performing and cost-effective cooling solution. In idle and light gaming, the fans will stop completely, resulting in a perfect noise-free experience. During heavy gaming, the card stays quiet with 31 dBA, but other custom GTX 950 designs do better here, reaching as low as 26 dBA, which is quieter than whisper quiet.

The GTX 950's power efficiency is excellent, just like on all recent NVIDIA Maxwell cards. In all non-gaming states, which includes Blu-ray playback, we see power draw hover at around the 10 watts mark, which makes it a good candidate for a quiet media PC. With the Gigabyte Xtreme Gaming, typical gaming power draw is slightly increased over other GTX 950 cards, which is due to the higher clock frequencies. I do wonder, though, why Gigabyte did not increase the card's power limit as the 8-pin power input could certainly take it; it would also result in additional Boost clock performance.

Gigabyte's GTX 950 Xtreme Gaming comes with the company's "GPU Gauntlet Sorting", which means Gigabyte will check overclocking potential of each GPU before production, binning the best overclockers to be used on these cards. Our sample did indeed overclock very well, but as always, there is some random variation, which makes a final judgment on how much of a difference such binning really makes difficult.

Overall, the GeForce GTX 950 seems like a very good card, but it is held back by pricing, just like the GTX 960 it is based on. The GTX 950 is basically a cheaper GTX 960 with proportionally less performance but the same feature set. NVIDIA's MSRP is $160, and Gigabyte is asking another $20 for their Xtreme Edition, a reasonable increase if you consider performance gained from the overclock out of the box. Still, the price is dangerously close to the GTX 960 that can be had for $190 and offers better performance. When looking at price/performance only, AMD's R9 285 should be on your shopping list as it offers higher performance at a lower price of $170, a price that could be lower if you are on the market for used cards. AMD's R7 370 is too slow and barely cheaper, and the same goes for the R9 270X. NVIDIA's GTX 960 is another good option if you have a few more dollars to spend.

We are also giving away one of these cards for free—all you need to do is answer a simple question. Contest details are here.