EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0, GTX 950 goes Super SuperClocked!

EVGA GTX SSC ACX 2.0 A Closer Look

Now that’s one fine looking EVGA video card, the classic black cowling and over sized fans cool the factory overclocked core which runs 166MHz faster than stock and with boost speeds you should see about 42MHz increase over the factory OC which is referred to as the boost clock.

EVGA put serious thought into engineering the ACX 2.0 cooling solution and it features DBI – DB noise Inverter and the fans only spin their Swept fan blades when need be. When operating at lower temperatures the fans come to a complete stop, The fans use double ball bearings for 4x the life span and 20% increased efficiency combine that with the SHP (Straight Heat Pipes) and you get a 6% cooler GPU and over all the improved cooling makes for a 33% cooler GPU. The Straight Heat Pipes are 8mm and offer 6% better cooling that bent heat pipes and we would suspect that the tubing interior being copper when you bend copper the metal gets harder and harder to bend creating a heat resistance greater than a straight pipe. The fans themselves use a proprietary design that makes the blade itself 700% stronger but we’ve never had a fan blade failure so we don’t know how much difference that will make but the 3 phase / 6 slot motor uses 250% less power and being a small fan you might think big deal fans don’t use much power anyway. Well there’s a reason behind EVGAs madness and Maxwell GPU’s have a power target and the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 has an Optimized Power Target which is tuned for optimal thermal, power and performance. Beyond that Maxwell GPU’s get a power pool and while you are allowed a small amount of power to add to the core you may not exceed the given power allotment in that pool, the optimized low power fans give that power threshold a little more power for overclocking by not using as much power so EVGA is a little ahead of the GPU curve by planning lower power tougher fans with a SH cooling system that all adds up to the highly advanced ACX 2.0 cooling system.

A bit of an oddity on this graphic is the QSD BIOS which is a Quick Switch BIOS that allows you to tweak with confidence and the secondary BIOS has an alternative fan curve for an ultimate cooling performance.

Since we were talking about Straight Heat Pipes here’s a peek at the copper heat pipes sticking out the end of the Video Card and the full length cooling fins that leach heat from your components to be whisked away by the improved heat pipe design keeping your EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 cooler than conventional designs. Notice the single 8 pin PCI-e power connector and the SSC stamp in red at the back-end of the Video Card. The logos should show through any reasonable windows case letting fellow geeks drool over your EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0.

One difference between the FTW model and the SSC model is the FTW gets a metal backplate and the SSC has a normal PCB backing. We are looking at a few bucks less than the FTW so dropping the metal backplate is expected and shouldn’t affect the cooling ability of the card by much but metal backplates do make for a tougher harder to damage video card.

EVGA uses a great combination of port connectors and we really like having just one DVI, DVI take up a lot of space and while there are millions of DVI monitors out there we just don’t have that much use for them. Most modern monitors have Display Port and/or HDMI and the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 has one HDMI and 3 Display port which should be more than enough for your average user and the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 is capable of connecting to 4 monitors simultaneously. Wwe doubt that you’ll be running multi-monitor gaming with a GTX 950 but you can set up one heck of a highly optimized work station capable of displaying a lot of data acreage.

Barely visible on the backside of the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 you can see one SLI connector and the card is capable of Dual SLI but you won’t be running triple SLI with the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 or any other GTX 950 because NVIDIA only allows one SLI connector so two Video Cards is the limit for SLI. Really we can see Dual SLI and the scaling is pretty darn good these days but you get past dual SLI and the scaling drops off dramatically so you see more triple SLI for bragging rights and world record runs than you do for daily use.

Popping the cowling off the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 we see the continuation of a trend we really like the digital power delivery to the GM206 core is straight inline with and close to the GPU core. The closer the components the less the resistance and response time. Notice the use of high quality all metal capacitors ensuring  nice long life for your video card and another nice touch from EVGA.

Here’s a close up of the GM206 core found under the hood of the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0 it contains 2.9 Billion transistors on a die 228 mm² in size.

Here’s the OnSemi NCP 81174 voltage controller used on the EVGA GTX 950 SSC ACX 2.0.

And lastly here’s a close up of the Samsung Memory model K4G41325FC-HC28 and you’ll find 4 of them on the card front and back totaling 2GB of GDDR5.