NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 950 Is A $150+ Bargain For Linux Gamers

For the sensor tests, the AC system power consumption was measured by a WattsUp USB power meter interfacing automatically with the Phoronix Test Suite. For the GPU core temperatures it's exposed based on what's reported by the driver. This reporting was enabled by the Phoronix Test Suite by setting the MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp and PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variables.

For DiRT Showdown, the GTX 950 had an average power use for the entire system of 150 Watts compared to 234 Watts with the GTX 980 Ti and 165 Watts of the Radeon R7 370.

As DiRT Showdown was one of the rare tests where the R7 370 performed better, the performance-per-Watt of the GTX 950 ended up getting pitted with this GCN 1.0 graphics card.

The thermal performance of the EVGA GTX 950 FTW wasn't very different from the MSI Radeon R7 370.

With Metro Last Light where the NVIDIA performance was much superior to the AMD GPUs on Catalyst for Linux, the performance-per-Watt of the GTX 950 was much better than the R7 370. The GTX 950 performance-per-Watt was also more than double that of the GTX 650.

Unigine Valley was another test illustrating the great power efficiency of these modern Maxwell GPUs.

Throughout this testing, the EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW had an average core temperature of 64.6C and a peak of 71.

The NVIDIA GTX 950 consumed less power than the AMD R7 370.