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Gigabyte have opted for a colourful box this time around, with ‘Xtreme Gaming' their centerpoint. No pictures of the card are visible on the front of the box.
The rear of the box highlights some of the key selling points with ‘Xtreme' written before everything, shown above.
The box contents are spartan, although we know from past experiences that Gigabyte tend to remove items from reviewer sample boxes shipped directly from the factory. A case badge, video converter and a ‘quick start' guide are included.
The card measures 227 mm long, and the cooler is formed around two 90mm fans, also in black. It is great to see the inclusion of a backplate – normally a feature of flagship products.
We like the appearance of the Gigabyte GTX950 Xtreme Gaming 2GB, it is a chunky card and due to the predominately black colour scheme will fit into any system build.
The Xtreme Gaming 2GB is equipped with a single SLi connector. It takes power from a single 8-pin power connector which may be less convenient than the typical 6-pin version for some users and their PSUs.
Hurrah for full sized ports we say. A DVI port, HDMI 2.0 port and three DisplayPorts are incorporated into the backplate I/O panel.
Gigabyte gives users control over the side LED colouring through the OS-based OC Guru II software.Blue, red, green, and yellow can be selected and the card can be set to activate its coloured LEDs all of the time, none of the time, or only when heavily loaded.
Under low load the cooler's fans shut off and this is indicated by a pair of white LEDs saying ‘Silent' and ‘Stop'. If preferred, the software allows for all LEDs to be deactivated.
Gigabyte overclocks the core frequency to 1203MHz which is a significant increase over the 1024MHz reference GPU speed. The boost clock is rated at 1405MHz, but we actually saw the card hitting 1481MHz during gaming. In a less common move these days, Gigabyte also overclocks the memory by 100MHz, resulting in an effective data rate of 7000MHz for the 2GB of GDDR5.
