Bjorn3D.com Bjorn3d.com – Satisfying Your Daily Tech Cravings Since 1996
Testing and Methodology
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, Overclocking And A Little SLI
| 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
For overclocking we used the standard test system listed above and spent a couple of hours tuning and testing. This isn’t a complete bitter edge OC where we run the card so fat it completes benchmarks but rather we took the card to the ragged edge then backed it down 20MHz. It’s not a good idea and it’s not recommended to run a Video Card right out there on the edge of instability, find the fastest not artifacting OC then back down 10 or 20 MHz to ensure you will enjoy your video card for a long time to come.
Here’s our stock picture of the EVGA GTX 950 SSC showing the factory OC of 1190 with memory running at 1653 real 6612 Effective.
Using EVGA Precision to overclock we got a core OC of 1292 MHz and a memory OC of 1789MHz so that’s 102MHz over the already factory overclocked core and 145 MHz over the factory memory clock speed.or 7192 Effective speed a pretty respectable core and memory OC.
SLI
We brought together the EVGA GTX 950 FTW and the EVGA GTX 950 SSC to run a benchmark or two and we ended up on settling for 3DMark as it’s a good commonly accepted video benchmark.
Now single card we scored in the 23,000 range and in SLI we scored 30,090 a gain in the 7K range so the scaling on 3DMark isn’t the best but the drivers on the GTX 950 are still pretty new so we expect SLI scores to increase as the drivers mature.
