NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 Review: Affordable Maxwell For The Masses
We spent a little bit of time overclocking the GeForce GTX 950 to see what kind of additional frequency headroom its GPU had left under the hood. For these tests, we used the latest edition of EVGA's Precision X GPU tweaking utility, which is designed to work with the new card.
EVGA's Precision X Tweaking Utility Running On The GeForce GTX 950
Overclocking a Maxwell-based GeForce GTX series graphics card requires a bit more tweaking then previous-gen products, due to all of the new options available and the complexities associated with GPU Boost. Sometimes, you’ll find that increasing a particular voltage or frequency may appear to function properly, when in fact performance decreases due to errors or throttling. You may also find that the actual GPU Boost clock may travel above or below the designated offset value when the power and/or temperature targets are also increased, thermals and power permitting.
EVGA Precision X Overclocked Data
To push the GTX 950's clock much higher than stock, we increased the power and temperature targets to 110% and 85'C, respectively, and also increased the GPU and Memory clock offsets by 85MHz and 75MHz and re-ran a few tests. Using higher settings resulted in some instability, though we don't think overclocking was working exactly as it should.
When all was said and done, our GeForce GTX 950's GPU overclocked to over 1400MHz, with 3.42GHz memory. We re-ran a couple of benchmarks but didn't see the kind of performance increases we expected. As you can see above, Shadows of Mordor showed a small improvement. The other games didn't show any difference, however, and we were unfortunately in-flight to San Francisco pulling together the numbers before we noticed the discrepancy. Regardless, the GTX 950 appears to have plenty of headroom. And with some tuning, significant overclocks will be possible for most users.
