NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 950 graphics card last week and we saw some good performance numbers from that $150 US graphics cards. Based on the Maxwell GM206 graphics core, the GTX 950 features high clock speeds and comes with good 1080P performance. Users over at Chiphell Forums have been testing the Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 950 OC graphics card and managed to overclock it to insane frequencies.
Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 950 Clocks Past 1500 MHz on Core and 8000 MHz on Memory
The Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 950 OC is based on the GM206-250-A1 graphics core that comes with 768 CUDA Cores, 48 Texture Mapping Units and 32 Raster operation units. The card packs 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM that operates along a 128-bit bus interface and a 90W TDP. The card is clocked at 1026 MHz base and 1190 MHz boost clock on reference specifications but comes with a overclock BIOs that pushes these clock speeds upto 1140 MHz base and 1329 MHz boost. Now we know the performance of the GeForce GTX 950 custom variants lies close to the GeForce GTX 760, around 15% slower than the GeForce GTX 960 and on par with the Radeon R9 370X graphics card from AMD. All of these cards retail at higher prices compared to the $159 US GeForce GTX 950. The card from Colorful is a custom variant that is priced at $179 US (a $20 premium over the reference GeForce GTX 950).
Looking at the design of the card, the Colorful GeForce GTX 950 OC comes with a dual fan cooler that has a small aluminum block with a single copper heatpipe dissipating the heat from the GPU block. The card does come with a backplate and is powered by a single 6-Pin connector. Display outputs on the card include DVI, HDMI and three Display Ports which is the reference Maxwell configuration. The iGame model comes with a special switch which is pressed to enabled the overclock BIOS to boost the clock speeds to 1140 MHz base and 1329 MHz boost clocks. At these clock speeds, the card reaches a 110W power limit which is 20W more than the reference design.
The user managed to overclock the graphics card up to 1506 MHz core and 2004.8 MHz memory clock (8.00 GHz) effective clock speed. These are insane since the clocks were achieved without any voltage adjustment and the the total system power consumption increased to 171W from 162W (OC BIOS) and 154W (Reference BIOS). With such a large increase in clock speeds, the power consumption raised just 17W and with the same cooler, the temperatures didn't cross 70C on full load under Furmark. The results obtained with these clock speeds are quite impressive themselves, over the OC BIOS, the 1500 MHz and 8.00 GHz overclock further rasied the performance by 10%. Compared to the GM107 based GeForce GTX 750 Ti (1242/1330/6000 MHz), the GTX 950 OC is up to 55% faster. Performance is also 2-3% faster than an overclocked GeForce GTX 760 and the card is just 10% slower than a overclocked GeForce GTX 960 that is operating at speeds of 1203/1266 MHz core and 7.2 GHz effective memory clock.
Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 950 (1500 MHz Core/ 8.00 GHz) Gaming Benchmarks:
Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 950 (1500 MHz Core/ 8.00 GHz) Synthetic Benchmarks:
With a small increase in voltage (1.2V), the user was able to clock the GeForce GTX 950 OC up to 1600 MHz core and 2000 MHz (8.0 GHz) memory clock. The temperature again didn't break past 70C which is shocking. This overclocking proves that Maxwell is one hell of an architecture when it comes to overclocking and delivers great performance efficiency.
Colorful iGame GeForce GTX 950 (1600 MHz Core/ 8.00 GHz) Synthetic Benchmarks:
