Review: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition

NVIDIA released NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 recently then immediately it become the new entry-mainstream graphics card priced at USD 160. Sub USD 200 price has always been a problematic area for NVIDIA because of price-performance comparisons to AMD, especially if you compare it with the latest AMD Radeon R7 370. Therefore, this newly released graphics card features a solid plus cost effective price point because it uses the same foundation in the 28 nm GM206 silicon on which the GTX 960 is also based.

The chip on this card might be tiny but when the graphics card is compared to R7 370, it has a narrower 128-bit memory bus just for memory chips on the card. NVIDIA improvised the card by increasing the effectiveness on the bandwidth. Luckily, NVIDIA sent us a sample of GTX 950 graphics card from ZOTAC – GTX 950 AMP! Edition and it comes with the company’s signature cooling solution featuring a full-metal, dual-slot, dual-fan cooling solution and a back plate.

The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition 2 GB features a dual fan design with dual heatsink to cool down the Maxwell chip. Besides that, the overall product looks sturdy and solid compared to its competitor out in the market.

At the back of the graphics card is a sexy backplate that most of the manufacturers tend to ignore because it might add cost to the production.

Comparing it to the previous generation of GTX 750 which doesn’t require any power connectors, the new GTX 950 requires a 6-pin power to run the card, which isn’t too bad because now you will have better performance with extra power in the card.

All benchmarks was done on maximum settings without anti-aliasing because anti-aliasing can kill the performance on the card easily. Therefore, we ran all gaming and synthetic benchmarks without turning on anti-aliasing. Even though the card is running at its stock clock speed, we’re already seeing a pretty decent score from the GTX 950, which is placed on the budget-oriented graphics card line.

Comparing apple to apple, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 blew away its competitor, AMD R7 370 with a huge margin in synthetic benchmark with better optimization.

The Fire Strike score without overclocking the GTX 950.

After 80MHz and 380 MHz boost to the GPU clock and memory clock, we’re able to gain an additional 456 points to the score.