We stopped by Gigabyte’s (TPE: 2376) suite at CES 2015 and got the low down on its latest and greatest products.

The company had a lot of nice systems featuring its products that were built by companies like Digital Storm, Origin, Cyberpower PC, and Cybertron PC.  There were many of its current offerings on display as well as some of the new ones like the company’s newest addition to the Brix lineup, the Brix S Broadwell.  The Brix S Broadwell features Broadwell CPUs that make the unit extremely power efficient. The brand new X99 SOC Champion features an OC socket for the CPU that allows the board to really push the NB/cache/uncore frequencies, thus delivering blistering memory and system performance.  The Asus Rampage V Extreme sure better watch out since this board is also  a cache/uncore/NB overclocking beast, and it only costs $300.

We will be following up with more insight into some of the products that Gigabyte had to show at CES 2015 in the coming days.  We will also have some pictures of the Extreme Overclocking event that it held as well.

Brix s Broadwell and the X99 SOC Champion

The Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5

The Gigabyte Brix lineup

An absolutely stunning custom build featuring an Enermax chassis and Gigabyte parts

14″ P34W Notebook

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Asus (TPE:2357) today announced the company’s new flagship graphics card with a single GPU: the GTX 980 Republic of Gamers (ROG) Matrix Platinum.  The custom designed card comes with a massive boost clock of 1342 MHz, and is cooled by a custom air cooler fed by 10mm heat pipes.

This is its third custom designed GTX 980, as the Poseidon and Strix OC versions have been out for a while now.  The card comes factory overclocked with a massive boost clock of 1342 MHz, although the base clock was not disclosed the memory has been left at the standard clock speed of 7 GHz.  The custom PCB has a 14 phase VRM to provide the card with stable power, and it requires two 8-pin PCI-E to power the card.  A unique feature meant for the most extreme users are the resistive traces in the PCB to keep the card warm enough to prevent frost when the card is used under LN2 (liquid nitrogen) cooling.

The cooling is taken care of by a custom air cooler with a high density fin-stack heatsink fed by 10mm thick heat pipes.  The two Asus designed fans that cool the heatsink are CoolTech hybrid fans that are designed to force air not only down but to the sides, essentially pushing air in an 180 degree arc.  The heatsink has been nicely finished in black, making the overall aesthetic much nicer.  Users will also appreciate that the card comes with a back-plate and a brace for the card which should help to prevent sagging.  Back-plates have been a noticeable addition to cards that consumers are getting more concerned about.  It not only can make the graphics cards much nicer when inside a windowed case but at times they can help with a bit of cooling if there are components on the back of the card.

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Since the September launch of Maxwell for high-end, we’ve seen Nvidia launch the GeForce GTX 980 as well as the GTX 970 and their accompanying mobile bretheren, the GeForce GTX 980M and GTX 970M. Now that Nvidia’s high-end GPU has had roughly a month of sales, we want to take a look at how well they’re doing and exactly why they are doing so well or so poorly. The GTX 980 is going for anywhere between $549 and $599 and the GTX 970 is selling for anywhere between $329 and $409.

We first decided to talk to some retailers, specifically some etailers across the globe. From our conversations with them they had indicated that they are essentially selling as many GTX 980s and GTX 970s as they possibly can and that when the cards had initially launched, they had difficulty keeping them in stock. Now, if we look at the stock situation for the GTX 980 and GTX 970 now, it appears to be better. A quick stock check of GTX 980 and GTX 970s on Newegg shows a fairly good amount of cards in stock, while some others are still out of stock or on order. If you look on Amazon, you can actually see that other than the ‘budget’ cards like the GTX 750 Ti, 8400GS and HD5450, the rest of the top 10 cards on Amazon are all GTX 980s and 970s, mostly being 970s. Do keep in mind that Amazon’s numbers are a rolling total, rather than a weekly or monthly figure meaning that the relatively new GTX 970s are already selling like crazy.

This lines up with what we’ve been hearing from our retailer friends who have all said that the GTX 970 is their best selling graphics card and that in many cases people are buying two of them at a time because of their relatively inexpensive price of $329. Two GTX 970s in SLI is going to be a lot more powerful than a single GTX 980 and only at a $100 price premium, if that. The retailers we spoke with also indicated that they had double digit SLI sales (dual 970) and it continues to be the best selling card that they have in their inventory. Some retailers even said, if they had more cards available to them, they’d probably sell even more.

In addition to retailers, we also polled a few system builders anonymously. In their case, we saw essentially the same behavior with the GTX 970 being the most popular card that they sold and the GTX 980 coming in second after it. Considering the $220 price difference, that doesn’t seem that far fetched. All system builders also indicated that the release of these cards, like many graphics card launches, helped boost sales significantly the the point where they could actually measure the difference in demand.

The really big factor here in all of this is that Nvidia has had an incredibly strong launch and has sold more cards than we’re actually able to count. What’s more interesting was that one of the retailers pointed us to a fairly thoughtful point, we haven’t officially broken into the holiday buying season yet and they believe that Nvidia’s graphics card sales are going to skyrocket during the holiday season. And considering how dominant the GTX 980 is in benchmarks, they suspect that many GTX 980 buyers are going to wait until the holiday season when they’ve been able to save up more money or get their holiday bonuses. The GTX 980 is a more expensive card, which is what’s partially keeping it from being as successful as the GTX 970. That’s primarily because the GTX 970 is 30% cheaper and only about 10-20% slower than the GTX 980, the more affordable card will always sell better than the highest end card if it delivers a good value, which the GTX 970 undeniably is.

So, we’ll be looking towards this holiday season to see exactly how well Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 do, but if early sales figures are any indication they are going to do extremely well and have a fantastic quarter.

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For a company called Colorful, being subtle is out of the question. It comes as no surprise, then, that the vendor’s variant of the Nvidia GTX 980, dubbed the iGame GTX 980, is one of the most over the top video cards you can buy today.

Featuring a massive cooling solution and a 14-phase VRM that makes other vendor-based GTX 980 cards look small by comparison, Colorful didn’t hold back on any segment when designing the iGame GTX 980. The non-reference PCB designed by Colorful features pure silver traces, the monster-sized VRM that draws power from two 8-pin PCIe inputs, server-grade tantalum capacitors, high-grade DPAK MOSFETs and high-current solid-chokes.

Colorful also managed to overclock the card, which is accessible the card through a dual-BIOS mode. The first BIOS runs the card at 1127 MHz core and 1216 MHz, while the second BIOS overclocks the GPU to 1178 MHz core and 1279 MHz boost. The memory clock in the first BIOS is 7 GHz, while it sees an incremental increase to 7.01 GHz in the second BIOS.

One of the main facets of this card is the large headroom that is available to enthusiast users looking to overclock the card. The iGame GTX 980 comes with a compound aluminum fin-stack heatsink and three 100 mm fans that ensure the card doesn’t get excessively warm even under heavy load. The back features a solid metal back plate along with a dotted mesh design.

In terms of connectivity, Colorful is offering three DisplayPort 1.2 ports, one HDMI 2.0 and one dual-link DVI connector. No word on pricing yet, but it is likely that the iGame GTX 980 will be one of the highest priced versions of the GTX 980 on offer.

If the iGame GTX 980 doesn’t quite cut it for you, you’ll be glad to know that Colorful is working on an even faster variant called the GTX 980 iGame Kudan. We’ll share more details as we receive them.

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Recently, there was a lot of buzz about the fact that AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) had been adjusting its Radeon graphics card pricing due to competition from Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 and 970.

Bright Side of News* ran a story about it, saying that it appeared as though AMD had been cutting the prices of its GPUs in order to be competitive with Nvidia. However, recently, AMD’s own Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy refuted these claims that AMD had been cutting the prices of GPUs and that any price cuts that had been occurring were at the add-in-board partners’ own decision and behest and the company had no part in it.

However, today, AMD’s own official AMD Gaming Twitter account stated the following tweet:

We want to bring affordable graphics to all, so we're running a channel promotion on our AMD Radeon R9 290 & R9 290X! http://t.co/CtV3HusPP1

— AMDGaming (@AMDGaming) October 14, 2014

As you can tell, it clearly states that AMD is “running a channel promotion on its R9 290 and 290X” and then proceeds to link to a PC Perspective article about Newegg’s new prices on AMD graphics cards. So, either things have drastically changed in the past week, or the company is simply trying to confuse us about what its actual intentions are. The company is also going to be reporting  earnings for 3Q 2014 on Thursday and the expectation is that it will perform along expectations, even though Intel beat expectations today and AMD’s share price got a nice 2% bump from Intel’s bellwether reputation for the PC industry as a whole.

The expectation is that AMD will need to produce some sort of a competitor for Nvidia’s GTX 980 and 970 because right now it appears as though AMD is going to have a very hard time selling its GPUs when compared to Nvidia’s if they don’t release anything competitive this quarter. In fact, there’s a very good chance that we won’t see any really new GPUs from AMD until next year. Also keep in mind that AMD’s Hawaii GPUs are essentially already a year old and need some refreshing at the high-end and if they continue to not deliver a new GPU every 12 months they are going to fall behind Nvidia. There’s no doubt that AMD’s Hawaii GPUs gave Nvidia a lot of competition and forced them to compete, but now the ball is in AMD’s court and they are going to have to deliver.

Now, if you head on over to Newegg, you can clearly see that the R9 290 and R9 290X have had its prices cut so that most R9 290’s are priced sub $299 and most R9 290Xs are priced at under $399. There are some obvious exceptions to this pricing, but the majority of cards are priced exactly where the original ‘rumor’ had them being cut. So, we’re not entirely sure where AMD’s messaging has gone, but they are doing a pretty good job of confusing consumers.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is highly coveted by gamers in India, but its high-end offerings have been prohibitive in terms of price.

In a market that is inundated with budget offerings, the $900 (Rs. 54,000) asking figure for cards like the GTX 780 Ti has meant that gamers looking for a high-end solution have largely had to look to the likes of the R9 290X, which costs a full $175 (Rs. 10,500) less.

That is no longer the case with Nvidia’s latest offerings in the GeForce GTX 900 series. The GTX 980 will be available at a retail price of $750 (Rs. 46,000), with the final price set to be lower than that. Considering the amount of features it offers, the GTX 980 will be an enticing option for buyers looking to upgrade their rigs. The GTX 980 is the fastest single video card solution available now, and easily outdoes what AMD (NYSE:AMD) has to offer in the R9 290X. 

For those that are looking for a mid-tier video card, the GTX 970 is set to launch in the country for $455 (Rs. 28,000), which is great value for money. The GTX 970 in early benchmarks blew past the R9 290, and in certain cases outdid the R9 290X. While there is a market in India for cards like the GTX 980, it will be the GTX 970 that most gamers will be looking to buy. Retailer listings for the GTX 970 indicates that the reference design will be in the vicinity of $450 (Rs. 27,750), with factory overclocked editions running up to as much as $650 (Rs. 33,000).

With Maxwell, Nvidia has managed to deliver better overall gaming and computational results while utilizing lesser wattage. The low power consumption leaves a lot of room for overclocking, a fact Nvidia touched upon during the announcement of the card. The best testament of Nvidia’s pricing is the fact that AMD reduced the price of the R9 290X in other markets by a full $100, bringing the price of the card to $449. Nvidia has been the one to reduce the prices of its cards after every new AMD announcement for a while now, so it must feel have felt nice for the Santa Clara-based giant to know that AMD is now the one who has to slash prices of its cards to match Nvidia.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has released a video that explains how the company used  voxel global illumination (VXGI) to debunk conspiracy theories of how the Lunar Landing never happened. Nvidia does this by addressing each individual conspiracy theory as they are presented using a real time rendering of the photos taken on the moon by the two astronauts and their craft. This was done using the only hardware capable of using VXGI, the GTX 980 using Maxwell GPU technology, which was just announced and reviewed by us yesterday.

The VXGI technology is not yet available as it must be implemented in a game engine and at this current moment has only been ported to Unreal Engine 4 for demonstration purposes. Nvidia states that this VXGI demonstration and technology will be available for testing once Epic Games and other engine developers are able to include VXGI into their game engines. As of right now, Nvidia says that it will be in Unreal Engine 4 around Q4 this year which should mean that we could see VXGI in games as soon as next year.

The whole Lunar landing debunking scene was a perfect way for Nvidia to try to commemorate the anniversary of the event as well as show off the graphical chops of the GTX 980, the company’s newest and most powerful GPU as seen in our review. Maxwell is the company’s latest GPU architecture and the GTX 980 is their fastest offering within the Maxwell family. VXGI will only work on Maxwell GPUs as of right now but there’s a chance it could see daylight in other GPUs in the future, very likely subsequent architectures.

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The Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 is Nvidia’s latest and greatest graphics card featuring the company’s new Maxwell GPU architecture. Nvidia claims that Maxwell is able to maintain performance while delivering better power efficiency. Sure, the Kepler architecture brought some amazing improvements when compared to the infamous Fermi architecture, but it was less revolutionary than the Maxwell architecture which debuted last year in the GTX 750 Ti.

Below, you can see a single SMM block diagram of the Maxwell architecture, followed by the full GM-204 architecture. Keep in mind that this is not the full-blown version of Maxwell.

The GeForce GTX 980 is based upon Nvidia’s GM-204 GPU which is a mid-range version of Nvidia’s full Maxwell architecture. Even though the GTX 980 is being sold as a high-end card, it actually slots very similarly into Nvidia’s product lineup like the GTX 680 did.

The GTX 680 eventually became the GTX 770 and slotted in below the GTX 780 (a chopped down Titan) and the 780 Ti which was the full Kepler architecture and above the 760 Ti, also a chopped down card. So, with the GTX 980 we should be able to compare to the GTX 680 which was GK-104 and the GTX 780 Ti, which was full-blown Kepler. The GTX 980 is also thermally 30 watts less power than the GTX 680 Kepler card while performing far faster than it.

In the new GPU, one of the most notable improvements was the increase of the L2 cache from 512 Kb all the way up to 2048 Kb. You can also see that Nvidia has made some significant improvements to a lot of the GPU’s design in order to improve efficiency. And the net result is that the GTX 980 has a TDP of 165w while the GTX 680 had a TDP of 195w, that’s a reduction of 30W or just under 20% in a single generation (going from GK-104 to GM-204) using the same process node (28nm). However, in order to build a GM-210 Nvidia will need a process shrink to enable them to shrink the die size and gain even more power efficiency and build a very dense 10 billion+ transistor chip.

In addition to the GM-204 GPU, Nvidia also opted to push for a standard 4GB of GDDR5 memory at 7 Gbps, resulting in some impressive memory bandwidth figures even though they only have a 256-bit memory bus.

Hardware

Moving on from the GPU and GPU architecture of the GTX 980, it’s easy to see that the hardware bears a very strong resemblance to the Kepler years starting with the GTX Titan. However, it is different in a few ways, including the fact that the card has two 6-pin PCIe connectors which means that it can draw up to 225w of power from the PCIe slot and power connectors in total. So, even though this card has a TDP of 165w, it can theoretically draw up to 225w, which means that this card could be an impressive overclocker with the appropriate cooling and voltage regulation.

Nvidia also included a backplate for the GTX 980 in order to help more evenly cool the back of the graphics card. This backplate, though, does  partially come off near the power connectors in order to properly allow for airflow into the fan when run in a very close SLI configuration with two or more cards.

Below, you can see the GTX 980 with the fan shroud removed but with the GPU heatsink, memory heatsink and fan still attached.

Once the GPU heatsink is removed you can see the bare GPU with the memory heatsink and fan (which are one assembly).

Then, once the whole assembly is removed you can see the GPU, memory chips, power phases and all of the various PCB markings, which actually show us that Nvidia only included 5 power phases on the GTX 980 even though the PCB can accommodate up to 7 power phases which could mean that this card may have some seriously overclocked versions already available at launch using the reference PCB.

The card also features three DisplayPort 1.2 connectors as well as a dual-link DVI connector and an HDMI 2.0 connector which gives you the ability to drive 4K in multiple ways as well as run displays at up to 5K resolution per display even though HDMI 2.0 only supports 4K and DisplayPort 1.2 only technically supports 4K as well. So, really, the maximum resolution per display is still 4096 x 2160.

Software

During Nvidia’s recent Editor’s Day — which is used to brief the press on upcoming products — for the GTX 980 Nvidia showed off a lot of things that directly and indirectly involved the GTX 980. Many of the advancements of the GTX 980 come in the form of software, which includes DirectX 12 and DirectX 11.3.  But that doesn’t change the fact that Nvidia was already running a DX 12 ported demo of Fable running on two GTX 980s.

Nvidia made four big announcements about the GTX 980 that were outside of DX 12 and DX 11.3 and those pertain to Nvidia’s own VXGI, MFAA, DSR and their advancements with HMDs (head-mounted displays) like the Oculus VR.

MFAA – Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing is Nvidia’s own technique of enabling higher AA visual quality while only experiencing a few percentage points of a performance hit compared to a lower quality MSAA. Essentially, Nvidia is claiming to deliver 4X MSAA-level quality at 2X MSAA performance (give or take a few percentage points). However, this feature is not quite finished yet and will be enabled in a future driver for testing and enabling higher quality AA at better performance levels.

In addition to MFAA, Nvidia has also implemented DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) which is essentially smart Supersampling with an applied filter. What it allows you to do is essentially trick the game into thinking you’ve got a much higher resolution display (like a 4K display) and as a result it will serve you higher quality textures and render the game in 4K. This generally results in much higher quality images even though Nvidia’s DSR technology will shrink the image back down to your monitor’s native resolution (like 1080P). This is great for both Nvidia and gamers because it means gamers can get a better looking game without needing to spend more money on a monitor and Nvidia can sell more expensive more powerful graphics cards without consumers needing to buy expensive 4K monitors.

Nvidia also talked about its own new technology called VXGI with a demonstration of the moon landing which uses the company’s own voxel-based global illumination engine. VXGI utilizes certain things within Maxwell’s hardware and within the game engine itself (Unreal Engine 4) in order to more efficiently and realistically recreate the bouncing of light off objects and to do it in realtime. VXGI itself isn’t implemented in any engine yet, but the expectation is that Unreal Engine 4 should have it by the fourth quarter of this year and we could very likely see it in games as soon as next year.

In addition to the VXGI stuff, Nvidia also took a stab at head-mounted displays and the latency problem. The company’s solution, dubbed Asynchronous Warp, is designed to half the latency of VR-related gaming in order to improve the overall experience and responsiveness of the platform. They went step by step looking for ways to improve VR performance until they reached Asynchronous Warp

Asynchronous warp takes the last scene rendered by the GPU and updates it based on the latest head position information taken from the VR sensor. By warping the rendered image late in the pipeline to more closely match head position, Nvidia avoids discontinuities between head movement and action on screen while also dramatically reducing latency. We haven’t tested this out ourselves yet, but this is a pretty drastic leap forward for VR if it can actually be applied across the VR landscape.

Performance

For performance, we looked at the GTX 980’s synthetic, compute, and gaming benchmarks to evaluate whether or not it really is as significant of an improvement over the GTX 680 and possibly even the GTX 78o Ti. After all, Nvidia wouldn’t really be naming this card the GTX 980 unless it really could perform in such a way.

The testbed consisted of an Intel Core i7 4960X cooled by a Corsair H100 on a Gigabyte X79 motherboard with 16 GB of DDR3 2400 MHz memory along with a Thermaltake 1475W Gold PSU and Patriot 128GB SSD all sitting atop a Dimastech Hard Bench.

First, we tested 3DMark using the Fire Strike Extreme test in order to give the best idea of high-end performance against other cards. Here, it fell between two GTX 680’s in SLI and two 7970’s in CrossFireX. It did beat the GTX 780 Ti, and proved that it was indeed more than twice as fast as the GTX 680, which Nvidia was essentially claiming during the majority of the presentations.

After 3DMark, we also wanted to take a look at the Unigine set of synthetic benchmarks with Unigine’s Heaven and Valley benchmarks.

As you can see from Unigine Heaven, the GTX 980 outperformed the GTX Titan and R9 290 by a fairly healthy margin and sat somewhere close to the HD 7970 GHz editions in CrossFire. Obviously this is a single GPU, but the fact that it falls within the realm of multi-GPU performance is awesome on its own.

In the Unigine Valley benchmark, we saw a much less drastic or impressive performance difference with the GTX 980 essentially falling between the GTX 780 and GTX Titan in terms of performance but still well out performing the R9 290 and AMD’s Hawaii GPU.

Following those benchmarks, we also took at look at two OpenCL benchmarks to see how Maxwell stacks up against AMD and how much Nvidia has improved over the previous Kepler generation. There was much talk that Nvidia had improved their OpenCL performance from one generation to the other so it was interesting to see if that was true and by how much. We tested LuxMark 2.0 and CompuBench 1.5 for our OpenCL testing.

In LuxMark, the GTX 980 performed fantastically, showing that it was faster than two GTX Titans and an R9 290. Of course, it wasn’t as fast as three GTX Titans or multiple 7970s, a 7990 or an R9 295X2, but I suspect that multiple GTX 980 GPUs could give AMD a run for their money since all of the faster AMD cards are multi-GPU.

In Compubench we saw some interesting results with the GTX 980 trading punches with the R9 290X beating it in some OpenCL tests and losing to it in others. If anything, the GeForce GTX 980 shows that Nvidia is a far more capable OpenCL competitor to AMD than the GTX 780 Ti ever was.

Following those synthetic benchmarks, we ran a series of 4K benchmarks to see how the GTX 980 stacks up against the most stressful gaming environments. In our tests, we played Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive at varying levels of detail.

In Battlefield 4, we can clearly see that the GTX 980 outperforms the GTX 780 Ti as well as the R9 290 but still falls short of coming anywhere near the monstrous $1,500 R9 295X2. However, the GTX 980 was without a doubt playable FPS and never dipped below 30 FPS according to our measurements.

In Crysis, we once again saw the GTX 980 outperform the GTX 780 Ti and the R9 290, but it still struggled to keep up with the R9 295X2 (which is triple the price). This is primarily because of the lack of memory and memory bandwidth to properly play Crysis 3 at those settings. So, if you want to run Crysis 3 at Very High settings with 4x MSAA, you’ll probably need a second GPU and then you should get pretty playable FPS.

In Counter Strike: Global Offensive, we weren’t expecting to see anything but triple digit FPS, but what is important is that the GTX 980 beats out the R9 290 and 780 Ti in terms of 4K performance and did cap at 300 max FPS at times. If you want to have the ultimate 4K gaming experience in CSGO you can totally do it with any of these cards, but the GTX 980 does it at a fraction of the power.

Power and Overclocking

At idle, the card ran at about 10% of TDP, or 16W and draws up to 90% of TDP or 148W under most gaming scenarios that we measured. The card never went over 80C and idled at 36C under normal usage. The maximum temperatures as well as idle temps may actually be higher than expected because of the fact that the testing scenario had higher ambient temperatures than normal due to a heatwave.

Last but not least, was overclocking which was more surprising than anyone would have expected. Sure, this card is a very low power card with a lot of in-bound power, but the overclocks achieved were simply mind blowing. In order to test the overclocks, 3Dmark Fire Strike Extreme was run for validation purposes.

In overclocking this card, we were able to push it to a GPU clock offset of +260 on the GPU base clock and +100 on the memory’s frequency. As a result the GPU base clock went up to 1,387 MHz and boost clock of a whopping 1,553 MHz, something that we have never seen from an air cooled GPU (yes, the fans were at 100% at that point). Even so, this performance was astonishing and resulted in some amazing 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme scores. We’ve also included some of the other overclocks that were achieved on the way to the max overclock.

As you can see above, the overclocked GTX 980 actually outperforms two Radeon HD 7970 GHz editions in CrossFire X as well as all the other cards anywhere near it. The only things that are faster are two GTX Titans in SLI and an R9 295X2. This is also being done at a very small amount of power, 206W to be exact, which means that there’s still more overclocking headroom left on this card, about 19W. As such, one would expect that consumers may see even more overclocked versions of the GTX 980 with some impressive manufacturer clocks that very likely could be pushed even further.

Conclusion

The GTX 980 is an absolutely stunning graphics card that delivers on many of Nvidia’s promises (namely the 2x + performance of the GTX 680) and does it at an absolutely amazing level of power. But that’s not even the best part, Nvidia released this card today at an even more competitive price of $549, which is the reason why AMD’s 290X recently had a price drop from $549 to $449. But do keep in mind that even though the R9 290X is cheaper, it still does draw more power and won’t overclock anywhere near as well as this card.

Nvidia is also releasing a cost-down version of the GTX 980 with the GTX 970, which understandably is a fairly slower version at $329. Unfortunately, we weren’t sent one for testing so we can’t tell you exactly how much slower it is, but it may be a major consideration if the GTX 980 is too rich for your blood.

Nvidia has without a doubt hit a homerun with the GTX 980 and Maxwell and it will be interesting to see what AMD has to answer this astounding performance and power improvement over the previous generation. This may not necessarily be a huge upgrade for anyone running a GTX 780 Ti, but it is a pretty serious upgrade for almost any other gamer out there that doesn’t already have that card. And not just that, the GTX 780 Ti is a $700 graphics card and you’re getting better performance at significantly lower wattage for much less money.

The GTX 980 is a great piece of GPU architecture and is a must buy for anyone looking to buy a new high-end graphics card this holiday season. It only makes us wonder what will eventually be possible once Nvidia unleashes the GM-210 full-blown Maxwell on this world, hopefully next year. As such, this card wins our Editor’s Choice Award and immediate buy recommendation.

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