PNY GeForce GTX 950 XLR8 OC Gaming Graphics Card Review

Overclocking and Overclocked Performance

Overclocking any Maxwell graphics card is a simple process and involves setting the power target to the maximum value, and gradually increasing both the core clock and memory. Temperatures rarely come into play as the stability tends to veer off before reaching anywhere near the GPU’s thermal limitations. In this case, I managed to increase the core clock by 135MHz and the memory remained solid with a 235MHz increase. This was achieved with a power target of 112% and 32mV.

3DMark Fire Strike

The revised overclocking procedure means we now list the review card and compare the additional performance against stock results from other products. This provides a clear indication of the benefits from overclocking and how it affects the GPU’s competitiveness. Here we can see the PNY GTX 950 XLR8 OC Gaming is tantalisingly close to the stock GTX 960 during 1080P synthetic benchmarks.

On a similar note, it’s evenly matched between this particular card once an overclock has been applied and a highly regarded version of the GTX 960 at stock values.

The deficit increases somewhat during the Fire Strike Ultra benchmark but it’s still another good showing for a GPU in this price bracket.