While Nvidia’s GTX 950 GPU received mixed response upon announcement, GALAX’s White-themed GTX 950 graphics card on the other hand got much attention and praise much due to its beauty of which it really is one beautiful card.
The GALAX GeForce GTX 950 EX OC WHITE is as what you see in the image below, a dual-fan cooling system that comes with white shroud, white bladed fan and even white colored LED when powered on!
Here’s a video, just to give you an idea on what it looks like.
Top down you see the words GEFORCE GTX, I thought this was rather interesting because if I were GALAX I would’ve put my brand there much like how Gigabyte placed the word ‘Windforce’ instead.
From the under side there’ no signs of heatpipes other than the ending points.
What makes the GALAX GeForce GTX 950 EX OC WHITE stand out from the crowd, other than the beautiful cooling system is the backplate, a white one at that too!
Here’s the view from the rear, it still comes with DVI output, in fact it has 2 of them! Clearly this card is targetted at budget users who might still be using old monitors.
Below is the GPU-Z capture for the card.
More details at the official product page.
Test Setup
| Processor | Intel Core i5-4670K |
| RAM | AVEXIR Blitz 2x 4GB 1600Mhz DDR3 |
| Motherboard | ASRock Z87 Extreme4 |
| Cooler | NZXT Kraken X31 |
| Monitor | Dell UP3214Q |
| Power Supply | FSP AURUM S 700W |
| Casing | NZXT S340 |
| Operating System | Windows 10 64bit |
Benchmarks
Unigine Heaven 4.0
*NOTE : Details are set to maximum.
| Card | 1080p (avg) |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition | 31.2 |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition OCed | 32.7 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition | 29.4 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition OCed | 31.4 |
| ASUS GTX 960 Turbo | 33.2 |
| PowerColor R7 370 | 18.9 |
Metro Last Light
| Card | 1080p (avg) |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition | 49 |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition OCed | 51.33 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition | 46 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition OCed | 49 |
| ASUS GTX 960 Turbo | 55.0 |
| PowerColor R7 370 | 46 |
Bioshock Infinite
Settings are at
2 – UltraDX11_DDOF | 2 – Custom | 1 – 16:9 | 4 – FullHD / 4K
| Card | 1080p (avg) |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition | 70.07 |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition OCed | 72.76 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition | 66.58 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition OCed | 70.97 |
| ASUS GTX 960 Turbo | 75.04 |
| PowerColor R7 370 | 35.06 |
Shadow of Mordor
Settings : Set to ULTRA, V-sync off.
| Card | 1080p (avg) |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition | 40.84 |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition OCed | 41.72 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition | 37.02 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition OCed | 40.24 |
| ASUS GTX 960 Turbo | 46.62 |
| PowerColor R7 370 | 21.78 |
Grand Theft Auto V
Settings : Every option to the MAX setting available. 8xAA for Full HD.
| Card | 1080p (avg) |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition | 19.3 |
| GALAX GTX 950 White Edition OCed | 19.7 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition | 18.47 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition OCed | 19.5 |
| ASUS GTX 960 Turbo | 23.4 |
| PowerColor R7 370 | 21.15 |
The numbers for GTA V may look low but that’s with 8x AA. The GTX 950 will handle the game well once AA disabled.
Despite being an already overclocked GTX 950, the GALAX GTX 950 with an ASIC score above 80 is capable of an additional 50Mhz increase on core speed. I tried pushing to an additional 100Mhz but it’s a NO GO.
Temperature
Furmark Burn-in Test was used to stress the card. Fan settings are at Auto. Room set to ~25c.
| Card | Idle(°C) | Load (°C) |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition | 36 | 68 |
| Gigabyte GTX 950 OC Edition Full RPM | 26 | 51 |
The cooler on GALAX’s GTX 950 worked very well, the fan halts on idle and maintains temperature when needed. On full load it manages to maintain load temperature at 51.
Power Consumption
The stress was done with Furmark Burn-in Test. Power consumption reading was taken from the watt-meter, actual power draw by the entire system from the wall point. I’m using an FSP Aurum S 700W with 90% efficiency and the estimated system power draw (CPU, not including GPU) during Furmark test estimated to be around 60w.
| Card | GALAX GTX 950 White Edition |
| Furmark Burn-in | 215 |
| Estimated Actual System Draw | 194 |
| Estimated Card Power Draw | 134 |
Despite the rated power consumption for GTX 950 being 90W, the GALAX unit seems to draw a lot of power on full load, surpassing even that of the GTX 960. Being a card that’s powered by a single PCI-E power connector, this means the card is theoretically capable of drawing up to 145W power.
My best guess is that the card was designed to draw more in order to maintain stability of running at overclocked speed, bear in mind that FurMark pushes the power draw limit but in actual usage the card wouldn’t be running at that draw all the time.
The Verdict
The GALAX GeForce GTX 950 White Edition retails at RM 849, based on my calculation on price to performance ratio one might conclude that it’s not as good as the cheaper cards like say the Gigabyte GTX 950 BUT do consider that the card comes pre-overclocked, it has a beautiful white back plate and it comes with a better cooling system that’s white in color and it comes with white LED that lights up the fans.
Are those details worth the additional RM 50? Yes they are.
