14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors about NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 950 have been circling around for quite a while, all the way back to July, so the possibility of an imminent launch of the card was undeniable.
We’ve been talking about this possibility of NVIDIA countering the wave of new entry-level cards coming from AMD with a new product since June, in the shape of the GM206-250 GPU. This card would counter the R7 370 from AMD equipped with its already classic Trinidad chip.
However, no actual physical proof was at hand until VideoCardz obtained an image showing the GeForce GTX 950 variant from PNY, which has a single fan and a heat sink covered in a black patterned shroud. As is typical of NVIDIA, the card will be released in customized editions only, without any "stock" version being manufactured by the company.
Closing the entry-level price gap with AMD
The shot from VideoCardz isn't telling us much about the technical specifications of the new card, except that it may have two DVI ports, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort in a two-slot design. It will probably have a 90W TDP, and previously it was believed that the card would have six or eight-pin PCIe power connectors to facilitate its thermal design power.
As we speculated before, it's highly likely that the GTX 950 will be built around a cut-down version of Nvidia's Maxwell GM206 GPU, having somewhere around 768 CUDA cores, 48 TMUs and 32 ROPs.
It's possible that clock speeds will be around 1150 to 1250 MHz, with a possible boost speed of 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus, half the size of its direct competitor, the Radeon R7 370.
Right now, the new undercut move from NVIDIA won't be to AMD's liking, since the latter is calculating its lower prices based on the former's most commonly sold GPUs, the GTX 970 and GTX 980, whose prices go well over $200 (€179). The new card from NVIDIA will bring the company closer to AMD's price range of $150 (€134), endangering its position in that favorable market segment.