NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 2GB Video Card Review – ASUS STRIX GTX 950

ASUS STRIX GTX 950 OC Video Card Overclocking

We spent a day overclocking the ASUS STRIX GTX 950 and used ASUS GPU Tweak II v1.0.6.9 for the very first time. ASUS GPU Tweak has been around for years, but it was recently updated to be easier to use.

ASUS GPU Tweak two has GPU-Z built-in and now has a live update for the utility itself as well as the driver and the vBIOS on your card.

You’ll need to clock on ‘Professional Mode’ to get to dials that overclockers are used to seeing! Here you can overclock your card manually by setting the various clocks and even the GPU voltage. We left the GPU voltage alone and cranked up the power target and then the clock speeds as high as we could get them. We ended up with +100 MHz on the core and +150 MHz on the memory with the power target at 111% (GPU temp target was at 94C).

In case you forgot, the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 graphics card is already factory overclocked up to 1165 MHz base with a boost clock of 1355MHz and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1653MHz (6612 MHz effective). By using the ASUS GPU Tweak II utility to overclock the core of the GPU by 100MHz and memory by 150MHz we were running at 1265 base clock (1455MHz boost) and the memory was at 1703MHz.

This overclock meant that we were running at 1518MHz at times thanks to NVIDIA Boost 2.0 on the core and 1728MHz (6912MHz effective) on the 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Not a bad overclock and it should be fairly common for people to hit over 1500MHz with no voltage increase needed.

ASUS STRIX GTX 950 Stock:

ASUS STRIX GTX 950 Overclocked:

By overclocking the ASUS STRIX GTX 950 DirectCU II OC 2GB video card we were able to take the stock score of 6156 and raise it up to 6490. This is a 334 point increase in our overall 3DMark score, which represents a performance gain of 5.4 percent. Not a bad little performance gain for free!