ASUS Strix GTX 950 DC2OC, Strix Goes Mainstream!

Test Rig & Overclocking

The OS we use is Windows 10 Pro 64bit with all patches and updates applied. We also use the latest drivers available for the motherboard and any devices attached to the computer. We do not disable background tasks or tweak the OS or system in any way. We turn off drive indexing and daily defragging. We also turn off Prefetch and Superfetch. This is not an attempt to produce bigger benchmark numbers. Drive indexing and defragging can interfere with testing and produce confusing numbers. If a test were to be run while a drive was being indexed or defragged, and then the same test was later run when these processes were off, the two results would be contradictory and erroneous. As we cannot control when defragging and indexing occur precisely enough to guarantee that they won’t interfere with testing, we opt to disable the features entirely.

Prefetch tries to predict what users will load the next time they boot the machine by caching the relevant files and storing them for later use. We want to learn how the program runs without any of the files being cached, and we disable it so that each test run we do not have to clear pre-fetch to get accurate numbers. Lastly we disable Superfetch. Superfetch loads often-used programs into the memory. It is one of the reasons that Windows Vista occupies so much memory. Vista fills the memory in an attempt to predict what users will load. Having one test run with files cached, and another test run with the files un-cached would result in inaccurate numbers. Again, since we can’t control its timings so precisely, it we turn it off. Because these four features can potentially interfere with benchmarking, and are out of our control, we disable them. We do not disable anything else.

We ran each test a total of 3 times, and reported the average score from all three scores. Benchmark screenshots are of the median result. Anomalous results were discounted and the benchmarks were rerun.

Test Rig

Test Rig “Hexzilla”
Case Type
CPU
Motherboard
Ram
CPU Cooler
Hard Drives
Optical	Liteon DVD Burner
GPU
Case Fans	1 x 180mm Mosfet / CPU / Ram cooling fan 1 x 120mm PCI-E Cooling Fan
Docking Stations	None
Testing PSU
Legacy	None
Mouse
Keyboard
Any Attempt Copy This System Configuration May Lead to Bankruptcy

Overclocking

It gets really boring testing every card on a dream system most end users and readers will never have, so we dusted off the Intel Extreme 1156 board with its Core I5 750 2.67GHz processor and 4GB of ram, Just for fun we dialed the resolution way down and went at OCing the ASUS Strix GTX 950 DC2OC, We did do a fresh install of windows 10, updated all drivers, and installed the latest and greatest Nvidia Drivers. We installed GPU Tweak 2 for overclocking, GPU-Z to check core and memory speeds and Kombuster for stress testing. Once we had everything lined up we ran Unigine Heaven 4.0 both at stock speed and OC’d.

Stock speed on a reference GTX 950 is 1024MHz and the ASUS Strix GTX 950 DC2OC runs at 1165MHz so we are already  141MHz OC so we aren’t sure how much OC is left on the ASUS Stric GTX 950 DC2OC.

After struggling for a short while we hit 1235MHz or an additional 70MHz and making the boost clock an amazing 1425MHz, We played with the Samsung Memory and got it to 1725MHz Real and 6900MHz Effective. We tried applying more power but setting higher than this went unstable after 20 minutes or so.

Before we overclocked the ASUS Strix GTX 950 DC2OC we got 98.5 FPS and a score of 2481.

After we applied our 70 MHz OC we got a 102.7 FPS with a score of 2587 so we got a little boost of 4 FPS and about 100 points more on the score.