[Review] MSI GTX 950 OC

[19_blackie_73]

Hey guys,

 

recently I had the chance to test a MSI GTX 950 OC as it didn’t work in the PC of a friend. In my PC it worked, so I compared it to my Gigabyte GTX 970 Gaming G1 to see how it performs in comparison. Because I didn't find any other tests on the internet of this particular card, I want to share my experience with it with you in this short review.

 

Test system is following:

- CPU: Xeon 1231v3 @3.4GHz, 4 cores / 8 threads, cooled by a bequiet! Dark Rock Advanced C1

- Motherboard: Gigabyte H97 D3H

- RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport Dual Channel 1600MHz

- PSU: bequiet! Straight Power E10 500W

- Case: bequiet! Silent Base 800

- Case fans: 1x 120mm Pure Wings 2 in the back (exhaust), 2x 140mm Pure Wings 2 in the front

- OS: Win 8.1, nVidia driver version: 361.43

 

First impression on this card: DAMN this thing is small (ok compared to my G1 Gaming it’s a bit unfair). The build quality is good, the plastic feels good and there are no LEDs crashing the colour scheme of the card. After installing it, I noticed it run already at a very high clock speed of 1367MHz out of the box, on par with my 970 also running at 1367MHz non OC'd. All tests ran at these speeds.

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

As I’m not a huge gamer, the only game test I include is GTA V. The only problem of the 950 series cards is the small amount of VRAM – I had to turn down the settings to medium-high, otherwise it would have gone over the 2GB limit. As it only costs 170€, this is not a big deal. Here I can't compare the performance to my 970 because the settings somehow changed after reinstalling my 970 so I can't compare them. I easily yielded above 40fps while gaming, in the benchmark I reached an average of 38fps overall.

Next thing I did was running Valley Bench: here's the scaling in terms of price to performance almost perfect, the 950 achieved an average of 31.2 fps, the 970 56 fps.

The most interesting part started when switching to Blender. I use my 970 most of the time for rendering in Cycles so this is the part that was the most interesting to me. Here the 950 really started to suprise me: it always was better in terms of price-to-performance which means: it costs only half as much, but the 970 is slower than the half of the time of the 970. I used 4 random scenes of mine: one closed room scene with hairs to render, one studio scene with a guitar, a 4K wallpaper of a Lamborghini Huracan and one selfmade benchmark scene. Additionally to that I used the BMW 1-series M-Coupe benchmark from Mike Pan. During all rendering, my 970 kept my CPU around 5°C hotter than with the 950.

As the results of the Huracan would not fit into my chart, here the raw numbers: 950 took 42 min 15 s, 970 made it in 23 min 53 s

 

 

Last Part: temperatures, noise, power usage. Here the stock cooling design suprised me again. It ran suprisingly cool with 68°C under full load and gaming and it was very quiet at this point, at least more quiet than my 970. Idle temps were also very good (between 26-28°C, ambient temperature ~22°C). For comparison, my 970 reaches between 60 – 65°C at full load and ~33°C at idle. Power draw was also no issue with 170W under full system load (cpu rendering on 6 threads and gpu rendering simultanously → this results in a 100% CPU load because the other 2 threads feeding the gpu) compared to my 970 with a power draw of 230W avg. Idle power draw was at 42W (950) and 50W (970).

 

Conclusion:
The 950 is a cheap and easy solution to get good price to performance. Even the reference cooler stays nicely quiet and keeps it cool. If you're on a budget, I strongly recommend this gpu not only because of ptp, but also because of size. This thing fits even in a tiny HP Pavilion case.

 

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment about how helpful this review was or what should be improved!

[Trebblebob]

I was going to say, I read that the 950 was faster.  I suppose it would just be slower because of the cards version.  This seems to react the same to my CPU (4790K) but this seems to run slightly hotter than my 970.  (Check signature)  I suppose this would be the way to go if you just want a cheap not as powerful 970.  Ha ha, my friend wasted his money bothering with a 750.

[19_blackie_73]

On 24.1.2016 at 8:19 PM, Qyndryx said:

I was going to say, I read that the 950 was faster.  I suppose it would just be slower because of the cards version.  This seems to react the same to my CPU (4790K) but this seems to run slightly hotter than my 970.  (Check signature)  I suppose this would be the way to go if you just want a cheap not as powerful 970.  Ha ha, my friend wasted his money bothering with a 750.

To which numbers do you refer?

Buying a 750 nowadays is truly a waste of money

[Trebblebob]

5 hours ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

To which numbers do you refer?

Buying a 750 nowadays is truly a waste of money

I can't remember but I actually meant a 750ti.  That is still  a pretty cheap and beefy card.

[19_blackie_73]

1 hour ago, Qyndryx said:

I can't remember but I actually meant a 750ti.  That is still  a pretty cheap and beefy card.

that's true, good value for the money, but I personally would prefer the 30 bucks more and get the 950