NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Overclocking Video Card Review @ [H]

misterbobby said:
Lol you have been all over the place video card wise and yeah its actually a little more than double since the 270x is a wee bit slower than either of the cards I listed.
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The 270x is actually a tad faster than the GTX660Ti and a tad slower than the GTX760.
 
mrrogers747 said:
Now THIS is a proper head to head article. All cards overclocked, all drawbacks mentioned (limited TDP slider.)

Either AMD has something big up its sleeves, or is shitting itself thinking about how well a higher TDP Maxwell part will clock/perform, power draw be damned.
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Well according to their VP, they have new cards due in November.
 
RadXge said:
I am not sure why someone who is already paying $400-$600 for a video card would not be willing to upgrade its PSU if needed. Unless you go 3x-4x SLI, any good PSU around $100 will do the job perfectly.

I understand that a low heat card is the perfect fit for a HTPC but I doubt it is an important criteria for most setup. That being said, the 780 ti is fine on the heat side and reviews of the 7XX generation did not point out that heat as a problem. We have seen worst. Much worst.
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You just answered why... A person could go 3xSli 980s on a 850 watt PSU. I sure as hell wouldn't do that with 290x for example. 2x290Xs at most. It is incredible that they did what they did with Maxwell on the same node as Kepler imo. Yes it does suggest something faster is on the way, just wait for that and be happy.

If you think it's a boring time for video cards and don't want to upgrade then don't post ? :rolleyes:
 
Something's coming from NVidia in Q1. I get the feeling that Titan 2 would be on 20nm and 60% faster than the GTX 980.
 
Thanks [H] for another great article. I'm excited about Maxwell, it's amazing how much improvement nVidia was able to introduce through a new architecture alone. Can't wait to see what Maxwell can really do once the new transistor node is ready. For now, I'll be getting myself a GTX 970, and hopefully I'll be able to get a nice overclocking experience too.

ps: Anyone knows if the TDP limit is a hardware limit, or is it defined by the BIOS?
 
It's defined in the BIOS. Skynet over at overclock.net has his variation of the BIOS that you can try out.
 
* Must wait for big Maxwell, Must wait for big Maxwell, Must wait for big Maxwell."
 
Since overvolting actually harms the clocks, have you guys thought about a little undervolting?

Might actually help the OC, who knows :eek:
 
Thank you for including the 4K benchmarks and the power consumption and commenting on the noise, but I can't help but feel that you've missed the main story.

You're actually only getting a modest 10% overclock on the GPU, from 1366 MHz to 1506 MHz, and ~15% on the memory, but you're seeing a much greater boost in performance. For example in Far Cry 3 on page 8 you're getting a 25% boost in average fps and a 20% boost in max fps and this is repeated in 4K on page 10. Why is there so great a performance boost? What does this bode for future Maxwell cards?
 
I've tried to get my clock to be +250, but the card just doesn't seem to like it. Mine seems to struggle going above 200...which isn't all that bad anyway.
 
trandoanhung1991 said:
Since overvolting actually harms the clocks, have you guys thought about a little undervolting?

Might actually help the OC, who knows :eek:
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I actually did this with great success on my GTX 280 in the past. I couldn't believe my eyes as it defied all logic that I had been taught at the time. I even flashed a custom bios with the lower voltage and higher clocks to the card. It was running beyond GTX 285 speeds.
 
I'm a cheap SOB.
There, I said it.
I went with a 750ti on my last upgrade because they ran cool, used little power and performed big at 1080p on Skyrim.
That being said....
I REALLY want to get a high end Maxwell gpu, it's been a long time since I've seen a card with so much headroom that performs so well.
 
Big headroom on the new GPU although the overclock on the 780ti is pretty light compared to what classified 780ti classifeds are known to do (had mine up to 1505 mhz in benching) - albiet thats a high end customised PCB (with some nice cooling). Daily driving at 1450mhz 1.35v in SLI.

A 29% clock lead 780ti vs 980 (1173-1516) and it makes about a 10% overall improvement so anyone with a 780ti overclocked 1200mhz + has no real reason to look at a 980 yet with all the power limitations in place. 980 classifieds should hopefully sort this out. Another user points out that a true overclocker hardly cares about power usage as they normally have serious cooling available so power usage alone doesn't make this card attractive. I'm more keen to see the DSR onto the keplar drivers.

This sort of upgrade over a 780ti is too minimal .. even overclocked. Running 1440p 3D here with 2x 780ti classifieds oc to 1450/7900 and i'm having to set the refresh to 100hz to maintain near top level settings in metro redux etc - i just can't quite get there at 120 hz. I need ideally 50% more .. not 10% lol.
 
Orthello said:
Big headroom on the new GPU although the overclock on the 780ti is pretty light compared to what classified 780ti classifeds are known to do (had mine up to 1505 mhz in benching) - albiet thats a high end customised PCB (with some nice cooling). Daily driving at 1450mhz 1.35v in SLI.

A 29% clock lead 780ti vs 980 (1173-1516) and it makes about a 10% overall improvement so anyone with a 780ti overclocked 1200mhz + has no real reason to look at a 980 yet with all the power limitations in place. 980 classifieds should hopefully sort this out. Another user points out that a true overclocker hardly cares about power usage as they normally have serious cooling available so power usage alone doesn't make this card attractive. I'm more keen to see the DSR onto the keplar drivers.

This sort of upgrade over a 780ti is too minimal .. even overclocked. Running 1440p 3D here with 2x 780ti classifieds oc to 1450/7900 and i'm having to set the refresh to 100hz to maintain near top level settings in metro redux etc - i just can't quite get there at 120 hz. I need ideally 50% more .. not 10% lol.
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The GTX 980Classified with 2x8 PCI-E power connectors and higher base clock 1291 - 1405 turbo should be really make a Huge difference with overclocking 980.. as it can disable the power limit with EVbot.. hopefully to that moment i want to see a Nvflash able to read correctly the BIOS values and make my own BIOS with +180% power limit and personalized voltage tables and boost tables =D..
 
1490-1516 mhz(hit TDP a couple times) with memory at 7800. voltage was 1.231. Thats all I can do on reference card.
 
madgun said:
Something's coming from NVidia in Q1. I get the feeling that Titan 2 would be on 20nm and 60% faster than the GTX 980.
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20nm won't happen for high end graphics cards, I'm betting on a new $700 price range card next year and a maxwell 2 refresh for the mid and lower GPUs. As far as the $500 range goes, I don't think we'll see any significant performance difference for at least a year. And the price for 28nm parts won't improve either at this point.

Coming from a GTX 680, I was pleasantly surprised that the 980 could give me 780ti performance+some at the same price I bought my 680 for. It's not a 2x speedup across the board, but DSR and delicious overclocking clinched it.
 
for single card users on 1440P and less (I know SLI has issues with DSR) is DSR what it's cracked up to be? Is it really good looking?
 
gigatexal said:
for single card users on 1440P and less (I know SLI has issues with DSR) is DSR what it's cracked up to be? Is it really good looking?
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I really does a good job in cleaning up the jaggies in some games. It makes a huge difference in the original Crysis since that game had horrible aliasing. Overall though its really not that big of a deal.
 
gigatexal said:
for single card users on 1440P and less (I know SLI has issues with DSR) is DSR what it's cracked up to be? Is it really good looking?
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I think DSR is a pretty big deal but only for Old games. I played the Witcher 1 with DSR and it looked incredible. That's the kind of use I think it's best for. Older games with lots of jaggies. Newer games probably don't benefit as much but I haven't been able to use it much. It worked with SLi for a few days and now I no longer have the option to enable it with SLi unless I disable sli. Anyway I'm sure they'll fix that stuff in time for MFAA which is coming soon.

EDIT: just go DSR working with SLi but had to disable my nv surround setup to do it. Interesting :)
 
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This is crazy! Makes me want to upgrade my GPU setup so bad! I'm still going to hold out for the 980ti, though and stick with my two 680s. They are still holding up well.
 
Domingo said:
I've tried to get my clock to be +250, but the card just doesn't seem to like it. Mine seems to struggle going above 200...which isn't all that bad anyway.
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Better than mine, Furmark makes my 980 SC insta-fail at any boost over 120.
 
Please list ACTUAL boost clocks as your offsets mean basically nothing. You people that have been here for years should know that. Adding +120 on an EVGA SC card thats already boosting to around 1375 mhz out of the box is a very high oc.
 
And please stop using Furmark; it's a power virus and were it not for the hard TDP cap your cards would've fried themselves.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
I think DSR is a pretty big deal but only for Old games. I played the Witcher 1 with DSR and it looked incredible. That's the kind of use I think it's best for. Older games with lots of jaggies. Newer games probably don't benefit as much but I haven't been able to use it much. It worked with SLi for a few days and now I no longer have the option to enable it with SLi unless I disable sli. Anyway I'm sure they'll fix that stuff in time for MFAA which is coming soon.

EDIT: just go DSR working with SLi but had to disable my nv surround setup to do it. Interesting :)
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Pfft. That's what SLi and 3-Way SLi is for lol. DSR in all games :D

Lord_Exodia said:
Just tried Oblivion and it looked Waaaayy better. I'm sure it'll help skyrim too.
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DSR is probably the best feature I've seen on video cards in a long time. Crysis 3 is probably the most impressive to me with it on. But I'd say it's a god send in those games where either MSAA doesn't do much to aliasing or the only option was FXAA.
 
pandora's box said:
Pfft. That's what SLi and 3-Way SLi is for lol. DSR in all games :D



DSR is probably the best feature I've seen on video cards in a long time. Crysis 3 is probably the most impressive to me with it on. But I'd say it's a god send in those games where either MSAA doesn't do much to aliasing or the only option was FXAA.
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DSR is literally driver based SSAA/downsampling/whateveryouwanttocallit, which you could already do with nvidia inspector, among various other programs. driver based ambient occlusion was a big deal, DSR isn't.
 
pandora's box said:
Pfft. That's what SLi and 3-Way SLi is for lol. DSR in all games :D



DSR is probably the best feature I've seen on video cards in a long time. Crysis 3 is probably the most impressive to me with it on. But I'd say it's a god send in those games where either MSAA doesn't do much to aliasing or the only option was FXAA.
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Crysis 3 seems like the worst example in the world to me because it doesn't really have any aliasing that's very noticeable. That game with SMAA looks just fine. Now the original Crysis is certainly a candidate for DSR.
 
Odellus said:
DSR is literally driver based SSAA/downsampling/whateveryouwanttocallit, which you could already do with nvidia inspector, among various other programs. driver based ambient occlusion was a big deal, DSR isn't.
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Coming from Amd with no down sampling support, it's a awesome feature
 
Damn. Think this may be my Xmas present to myself...how much do you think I could get for 2x6970s?
 
close to nothing, honestly

but a 970 if you can find one can be had for 400, that's doable, and maybe ebay would give you 100 bucks each for your 6970s?
 
Odellus said:
DSR is literally driver based SSAA/downsampling/whateveryouwanttocallit, which you could already do with nvidia inspector, among various other programs. driver based ambient occlusion was a big deal, DSR isn't.
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Something that automatically works for a dad of three.... pretty freakin' awesome.
 
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Orthello said:
Big headroom on the new GPU although the overclock on the 780ti is pretty light compared to what classified 780ti classifeds are known to do (had mine up to 1505 mhz in benching) - albiet thats a high end customised PCB (with some nice cooling). Daily driving at 1450mhz 1.35v in SLI.

A 29% clock lead 780ti vs 980 (1173-1516) and it makes about a 10% overall improvement so anyone with a 780ti overclocked 1200mhz + has no real reason to look at a 980 yet with all the power limitations in place. 980 classifieds should hopefully sort this out. Another user points out that a true overclocker hardly cares about power usage as they normally have serious cooling available so power usage alone doesn't make this card attractive. I'm more keen to see the DSR onto the keplar drivers.

This sort of upgrade over a 780ti is too minimal .. even overclocked. Running 1440p 3D here with 2x 780ti classifieds oc to 1450/7900 and i'm having to set the refresh to 100hz to maintain near top level settings in metro redux etc - i just can't quite get there at 120 hz. I need ideally 50% more .. not 10% lol.
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Haterz gonna hate. The 980 is a beast and 780ti's are all over eBay for sale since the 970 and 980 launched.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
I think DSR is a pretty big deal but only for Old games. I played the Witcher 1 with DSR and it looked incredible. That's the kind of use I think it's best for. Older games with lots of jaggies. Newer games probably don't benefit as much but I haven't been able to use it much. It worked with SLi for a few days and now I no longer have the option to enable it with SLi unless I disable sli. Anyway I'm sure they'll fix that stuff in time for MFAA which is coming soon.

EDIT: just go DSR working with SLi but had to disable my nv surround setup to do it. Interesting :)
Click to expand...

It works great on newer games too. I'm using DSR on Alien Isolation and Ryse Son of Rome also.
 
Blkout said:
It works great on newer games too. I'm using DSR on Alien Isolation and Ryse Son of Rome also.
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Are you running SLi or surround by any chance? How is performance in those 2 games. They are on my to-buy list.
 
I haven't bought a top tier cards in over 10 years, but the 980 made me do it! My Custom cooled Gigabyte Windforce 670 will go to my son, who has my old 460, so he'll be happy!

The 980GTX is just an awesome card. Great comparison guys! :cool:
 
Nice review as always.

Those are some sweet looking cards.. can't wait to see what they accomplish when they go to 20nm.

Are these the same gpu/chips that we thought was going to launch in May, but wouldn't have beat the radeon? Or did they tape out a whole new run of improved GPUs?
 
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