ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition 2 GB Review

Name: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition 2 GB
Brand: ZOTAC

W1zzard

on Aug 20th, 2015,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ZOTAC

(9 Comments) »

Introduction

Today, NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 950, its new entry-mainstream graphics card priced at $160. Sub-$200 has always been a problematic area for NVIDIA because of price-performance comparisons to AMD, with the company selling more volumes only because of a better-proliferated sales and marketing network. AMD's recent product launches, such as the Radeon R7 360, R7 370, and R7 380, put even more heat on NVIDIA. Particularly the Radeon R7 370 irritates NVIDIA. Priced at $149, the card offers better performance than the similarly priced GTX 750 Ti. It takes a $199 GTX 960 to outperform it, and so the company's $150-ish price-point is left rather vulnerable. This necessitates a new SKU, the GeForce GTX 950.

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.

The GeForce GTX 950 is carved out of the GM206 silicon, by disabling two of its eight streaming multiprocessor (SMM) units. It's a rather huge 25% drop compared to the GTX 960 and results in a CUDA core count of 768. At 48, the TMU count is proportionately lower as well. At 32, the ROP count is the same, and so is the memory bus of 128-bit. 2 GB is the standard memory amount, and unlike with the GTX 960, we don't expect NVIDIA to introduce 4 GB variants. The core is clocked at 1024 MHz, with a GPU Boost frequency of 1188 MHz, and the memory ticks at 6.60 GHz (GDDR5-effective), which gives you 105.6 GB/s memory bandwidth.

In this review, we will test the ZOTAC GTX 950 AMP! Edition, that comes with the company's signature cooling solution featuring a full-metal, dual-slot, dual-fan cooling solution and a backplate. GPU frequency has been increased significantly to a base clock of 1203 MHz, and memory has also been overclocked to 1755 MHz.

The price increase over the reference design is a reasonable $15, which brings the total to $175.

Also check out our other GTX 950 reviews today: ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte

GeForce GTX 950 Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 750 Ti	Radeon R7 265	Radeon R7 370	Radeon R9 270X	GeForce GTX 950	ZOTAC GTX 950 AMP!	GeForce GTX 760	GeForce GTX 960	Radeon R9 285	Radeon R9 380	Radeon R9 280X	Radeon R9 290
Shader Units	640	1024	1024	1280	768	768	1152	1024	1792	1792	2048	2560
ROPs	16	32	32	32	32	32	32	32	32	32	32	64
Graphics Processor	GM107	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	GM206	GM206	GK104	GM206	Tonga	Tonga	Tahiti	Hawaii
Transistors	1870M	2800M	2800M	2800M	2940M	2940M	3500M	2940M	unknown	unknown	4310M	6200M
Memory Size	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	128 bit	128 bit	256 bit	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit
Core Clock	1020 MHz+	925 MHz	975 MHz	1050 MHz	1024 MHz+	1203 MHz+	980 MHz+	1127 MHz+	918 MHz	970 MHz	1000 MHz	947 MHz
Memory Clock	1350 MHz	1400 MHz	1400 MHz	1400 MHz	1653 MHz	1755 MHz	1502 MHz	1753 MHz	1375 MHz	1375 MHz	1500 MHz	1250 MHz
Price	$120	$140	$150	$150	$160	$175	$210	$190	$200	$200	$210	$250

Packaging

You will receive:

Graphics card
Documentation + driver CD
DVI adapter
PCIe power cable

The Card

ZOTAC is using the new cooler design it introduced recently. The cooler is made from metal for that ultimate high-quality feel. A metal backplate is included as well. It wraps around the PCB slightly, making the card feel even more pristine. Dimensions of the card are 11.5 cm x 20.0 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include one full-size DisplayPort, one HDMI port, and two DVI ports.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.