Power Consumption

The GTX 980, GTX 970, GTX 960 and GTX 950 do not bring a huge performance boost compared to the previous generation, but they prove Maxwell is vastly more efficient than Kepler, at least in high end segment. The GTX 980 has a TDP of just 165W, GTX 970 has a TDP of just 145W, GTX 960 has TDP of just 120W and GTX 950 has TDP of 90W.

While it might have more CUDA cores, higher GPU clocks and faster memory compared to the GTX 750 Ti, the Geforce GTX 950 has a higher 90W TDP, compared to 60W on the GTX 750 Ti. This means that some HTPC users will be unhappy to hear that it needs a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector.

ASUS GTX 950 Strix OC card is factory overclocked (141MHz for the GPU) and this increases power consumption. We do not have reference card so we don’t know the exact difference in real life conditions, but we compared it to the EVGA GTX 950 FTW.

Playing games at 1080p resolution makes no big difference in power consumption between the two GTX 950 cards. In some games we measured less in other more power consumption. When we switched to 1440p and 4K resolution, which is however not a target resolution for the GTX 950, we measured a couple of watts more for the EVGA GTX 950 FTW card, probably due to its higher clocks.

Compared to the GTX 960 which consumes at maximum about 129W, the GTX 950 Strix card consumes about 10W to 15W less.