The ASUS GeForce GTX 950-2G won’t have auxillary 6 or 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors, but still hits NVIDIA’s references performance specs.
The ASUS GeForce GTX 950-2G won’t have auxillary 6 or 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors, but still hits NVIDIA’s references performance specs.
Squeezing surprising performance from low-power system configurations is the order of the day as ASUS reveals their GeForce GTX 950-2G. Based broadly on the NVIDIA GTX 950’s reference specifications, the new model one-ups the competition by achieving that within a 75W envelope, allowing it to do without additional PCI-Express power via a 6 or 8-pin power connector.
As the name suggests the ASUS GeForce GTX 950-2G is equipped with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM, and matches NVIDIA’s reference specs in terms of both CUDA cores (768) and a 128-bit memory bus. The card has both a stock clocked mode, with base and boost clocks of 1026 MHz and 1190 MHz respectively; surprisingly however it is also kitted out with an OC profile that pushes these values all the way to 1051 MHz/1228 MHz Base/Boost. Memory speeds remain standard at 6.6 GHz effective. Performance should comfortably exceed that of the GTX 750 Ti, making it a solid entry-level card for modern 1080p gaming.
The display outputs for this flavour of GTX 950 differs a little from the reference specification, and indeed ASUS’s more powerful GTX 950 STRIX. The design shaves off a couple of DisplayPorts, limiting the user to one DVI-I, one HDMI 2.0 and one Displayport 1.2a output in total; as a result it can output to a maximum of three displays.
ASUS are cooling components with a fairly hefty dual-fan cooler featuring twin 70mm fans and a white shroud. Combined with a black PCB, it matches the livery of their own mainstream ‘Signature’-series motherboards such as the Z170-A and Deluxe.
As it doesn’t require additional (non-bus) power the GTX 950 is ideal for cramped mATX and mini-ITX small form factor systems or configurations where running an additional power cable to the GPU is impractical. Despite this you will still need to ensure that the motherboard’s power delivery is sufficiently robust to handle 75W through the PCI-E slot, something which nonetheless should be the case in the vast majority of situations.
More information on the ASUS GeForce GTX 950-2G can be found at the product page.
