The EVGA GeForce GTX 750 SuperClock is based around nVidia’s GeForce GTX 750, a chip that was released in early 2014 alongside its slightly more powerful brother, the 750 Ti – which itself sits just outside the £100 limit of this feature. Both the 750 and 750 Ti marked a radical shift for nVidia. Gone was the desire to pump the most pixels out of the silicon. Instead, these chips aimed to produce similar performance to previous-generation products, but while consuming much less power. In truth, this was always going to make this a slightly underwhelming product, since you were sacrificing the expected speed improvement in order to obtain lower consumption – and lower consumption, while laudable, is hardly calculated to excite or thrill. (Also see: How to upgrade your PC’s graphics card.) That explains the rather disappointing specs of this card. Whereas the GeForce GT 740 OC offered effective memory clocks of 4.5 to 5GHz, the GTX 750 OverClock can only push up to 5.012GHz – and the similarly-priced but more conventional Radeon R7 260X hits 6GHz. Neither has the 128bit memory bus been improved upon, and the GTX 750 scores a memory bandwidth of 80.2GB/sec – only very marginally ahead of the GT 740’s figure of 80GB/sec, despite the latter costing around £20 less, and a good distance behind the 260X’s 96GB/sec. (Also see: What’s the best budget graphics card 2015.) The GTX 750 does tout a rather stellar core clock speed of 1294MHz. This outstanding figure towers over the R7 260X’s 1050MHz, and casts an even longer shadow over the 950-1033MHz specs of the £65 cards. But, as we’ve seen already with the GT 740, high core clock speed means rather less than the number of texture units. And here the 750 loses miserably, offering just 32 in response to the R7 260X’s complement of 56. The 750, then, delivers a texture fill rate of 41.4GT/sec that is only a slight improvement on the 38GT/sec produced by the much-cheaper Radeon R7 250X. And the Radeon R7 260X wins handsomely, with a texture fill rate of 58.8GT/sec. The GTX 750 loses out on stream processors, too, with just 512 of them to put up against the 260X’s 896. But if it is indeed power that drives you on, you’ll relish the 750. So conservative is it, it doesn’t even require additional power from the PSU – the 260X, in contrast, requires an extra 6pin connector. And the 750’s TDP of 60 watts is almost half that of the 260X OC’s 115 watts. Indeed, of all the cards here, only the two cheapest cards have lower TDPs. In the realworld, the gap isn’t quite as big, but we were regularly detecting drops of more than 45 watts between the 750 and the 260X. The 750 is quieter as well. (Also see: What’s the best graphics card 2015.)
