ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition Video Card Review

Introduction

NVIDIA unleashed its new GeForce GTX 950 a couple of days ago, powered by the cut down GM206 GPU, aiming at the MOBA and casual gamers. The video card is a great upgrade for gamers with older video cards like the GTX 650 or GTX 750/GTX 750 Ti, as it offers big improvements in not just performance, but power consumption and temperatures.

We've taken a look at the MSI GeForce GTX 950 Gaming 2G, but our second card to hit the labs is the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition. ZOTAC is a company that continues to surprise, so we're hoping that the fun doesn't end with the mid-range, GM206-based GeForce GTX 950.

There's not much difference between the slew of GTX 950s being released, with the biggest changes being slight tweaks in cooling technology, clock speeds and display outputs. ZOTAC has changed some things for the better, while some parts of the card go backwards. Let's get into it, shall we?

Quick Specs

All GeForce GTX 950s are relatively the same, with 768 CUDA cores, 48 texture units, 32 ROPs and 2GB of GDDR5 RAM spread out on a 128-bit memory bus.

Where the Maxwell architecture shines is in its display connectivity, something that ZOTAC normally doesn't touch. But the company has decided to change it up for the GTX 950 AMP! Edition, offering up 2 x DVI ports, 1 x HDMI and 1 x DisplayPort versus the usual 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI 2.0 and 1 x DVI. I would dare say this is because the GTX 950 is aimed at MOBA and casual gamers who wouldn't necessarily have DisplayPort compatible monitors, and would most likely still have monitors using DVI ports.

Availability & Price

NVIDIA has a price of $159 on the new GeForce GTX 950, with the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 950 AMP! Edition being priced a little higher. For instance, we found a listing at the time of writing on Amazon for $180 including free shipping for this model. We should see vast availability of these, with NVIDIA pumping out a considerable number of GM206 GPUs.