The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTThe Test
For the launch of GTX 980 we are using NVIDIA’s press beta drivers for the card, release 334.07 beta. This is the first (semi) public release of the R343 driver set, and coinciding with the release of the Maxwell 2 architecture it also marks the end of support for NVIDIA’s D3D10 GPUs: the 8, 9, 100, 200, and 300 series. Beginning with R343 these products are no longer supported in new driver branches and have been moved to legacy status.
Meanwhile as noted earlier, due to time constraints and hardware problems today we are focusing our coverage on the GTX 980. Next week we will be looking at GTX 980 SLI (hint: it’s fast) and GTX 970.
And on a testing note, as is standard for our reviews we are using our reference Radeon R9 290X for our 290X benchmarks. For this reason we are including both the standard and uber modes for the sake of clarity and completeness. The temperature throttling that the reference 290X suffers from is basically limited to just the reference 290X, as the non-reference/custom models use open air coolers that have no problem dissipating the 290X’s full heat load. Both modes are included for this reason, to demonstrate how a reference 290X performs and how a custom model would perform. At this point you can still buy reference 290X cards, but the vast majority of retail cards will be of the non-reference variety, where the 290X Uber mode’s results will be more applicable.
CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 290 AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 344.07 Beta AMD Catalyst 14.300.1005 Beta |
OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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Ash_ZA - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
Instead of the VXDI animated tech demo of the moon landing they should of just used a studio to film it and passed it off as animated. ;)LadyGamer85 - Thursday, October 16, 2014 - link
How was he able to over volt to 1.25 ? I can only get 1.21 on mine :(onmybikedrunk - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I love this card. I have an SLI config and OC'd (very stable) to 1518Mhz Boost and an 8Ghz Memory Clock with EVGA's ACX 2.0 cooler! Incredible how well this card OC's. For the price to performance ratio you get, this is a steal!AxeMastersINC - Friday, February 27, 2015 - link
Does overclocking the 980 using the perimeters here shorten its life?