MSI GTX 950 Gaming 2G Video Card Review
Final Thoughts about the MSI GTX 950 Gaming 2G Video Card
Over the last few years, Nvidia has really focused on efficiency and getting more performance per watt. It wasn’t that long ago that even the lower end cards needed massive, high-speed fans to deal with the heat. Maxwell has changed that for Nvidia. The entire line up, at least from their partners feature 0-speed or low speed fans at idle. MSI takes it even further with their Twin Frozr cooler. Power, performance, and efficiency is where Nvidia’s focus is and it is showing.
Not too often am I drawn into a manufacture’s software. Typically, it has been my experience that it is buggy, doesn’t work as advertised, or is just a gimmick. However, MSI’s afterburner software I use with every GPU review that I do. I use it to feed the LCD screen on the G19 for temp monitoring, overclocking or underclocking, or just keeping an eye on the overall health of the PC. My overclocking adventure at this point is hit or miss. You may have noticed that in this review, I didn’t include the results yet. It was quite random the failures that I experienced. It didn’t matter what software I used, I even swapped out the motherboard, memory, PSU, and constantly I would get the error indicating the Graphics Driver had stopped responding. Even at a 2MHz increase. At this point the voltage adjustment is missing from Afterburner and the driver is still in beta, so for now I’m going to chalk that up to driver issues which I am sure will be resolved with the WHQL driver release and an update to Afterburner.
I appreciate it when manufactures break out from the reference design. MSI takes the power management above and beyond Nvidia’s reference design without over designing and adding unnecessary cost to the card and with this card being a “budget” card cost is a factor on this card, it makes perfect sense.
Performance wise, the GTX 950 is a perfect fit for the $150(ish) market. With the highest settings in game at 1080p the MSI GTX 950 did well. When you’re looking at cards in this price range, I don’t expect them to run 90 frames per second with all the bells and whistles turned on. However, there are just a few tweaks and you’ll be gaming at around 60 FPS with no or little noticeable difference in image quality.
The wider body makes up for the potential cooling loss as the heatsink is slim. This is a benefit for consumers that run SLI. Typically there is very little space between the two cards. Now I am not saying you will have miles between the two cards, but there should be enough space between them to effectively cool both cards. During testing at the stock clock speed of this card, temperatures never went above 55° and the fan speeds, according to MSI’s Afterburner software never went above 40% and the system pulled 186 watts (max) as compared to the R9 270, which had a temperature of 63°, 50% fan speed and pulled a max of 208 watts (max) from the wall.
See, the word “budget” does not have to have a negative image attached to it. If you’re looking to do 1080p gaming and save some scratch for other components, give the MSI GTX 950 Gaming 2G video card a good long look. Getting into gaming or upgrading your PC doesn’t have to be expensive. A modest PC can be built with enough cash left over for a game or two. Quiet gaming with good performance is where MSI is headed with this card and I think they hit the nail on the head. Overclocking issues aside, I can’t really find any reason why I wouldn’t recommend this card for solid 1080p gaming, the MSI GTX 950 Gaming 2G video card earns the Modders-Inc Recommended Hardware award.
