Packaging & Detailed Look
The Packaging
EVGA has used a plain box from the front, which doesn’t look too appealing — so let’s dive right into the packaging of the GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+.
The front of the box, as we said, is quite plain.
The back of the box, is where the show begins. We find out all about the features of the card thanks to NVIDIA’s various features, technologies and tricks it can do. EVGA explains that there’s 2816 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5, and the display configuration used.
Inside, the card is protected by a shell of plastic.
Detailed Look
EVGA has always had some of the slickest looking video cards on the market, with the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ being no different. It’s one of the best looking GTX 980 Ti cards that I’ve seen so far.
The front of the card is where the ACX 2.0+ cooler makes its debut, with EVGA keeping to the great dual-slot form factor meaning you’ll have no troubles putting a few of these into SLI. The card measures in at 267mm in length, which means it should fit into most cases.
The back of the card is covered in a huge, beautifully detailed backplate. This is what sets the Superclocked+ (with a plus) apart from the standard Superclocked model, the backplate.
EVGA has stood by NVIDIA’s default output configuration from the Maxwell architecture, meaning we have triple DisplayPort out, HDMI 2.0 and DVI.
From the bottom of the card, you can see the massive heat sink arrays that EVGA has deployed to keep the card and all of its components nice and cool.
At the top of the card, those same heat sinks are visible. To the left, we have an 8-pin + 6-pin PCIe power configuration.
At the very end of the card, we see the four heat pipes poking through the massive heat sink, keeping the entire GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ both incredibly cool, and whisper quiet thanks to its cool operating temperatures.
The 8-pin + 6-pin PCIe power configuration we mentioned before, in closer detail.
The backplate that EVGA has used not only serves its purpose to keep the rear of the card cool, but it looks so great, too.
Is that shiny-new GeForce GTX 980 Ti not fast enough for you? Overclock it!
is fast; this we know. And now that you’ve just spent $650 on your new «baby Titan X,» what are you planning to do? Sure, you could play games all day, but we have other plans. With the initial review all wrapped up in a tidy bow, we wanted to soup up our hot rod and overclock the 980 Ti. So today, we’re sharing the results of our testing. Just to be clear, overclocking isn’t something to be done haphazardly. We noted in the review that bumping the GPU clocks by 10 percent and the GDDR5 clocks by 5 percent should be an easy and safe goal that any 980 Ti can attain. Turns out those are very tame targets, and now that we’ve had a couple of extra days of testing we’re ready to kick it up a notch.
The stock clocks on the 980 Ti are 1,000MHz core and 7,010MHz VRAM. We’re not trying to redline the card here, as fine-tuning to the ragged edge of stability takes more time, not to mention the variability between cards as well as games. Instead, armed with EVGA’s Precision X16 utility and with a knowledge of how well GTX 980 and Titan X overclock, we set our sights on settings that should be in reach of any well-cooled system. First, we set the power target to the maximum plus 10 percent (275W instead of 250W), as without increasing the power target we aren’t likely to see much in the way of performance gains. With that done, we pushed the throttle until we encountered turbulence, and then we eased off a bit and settled for a bump of 200MHz on the core and 800MHz (plus 400MHz in Precision X16) on the VRAM.
That represents a rather impressive 20 percent core overclock and an 11 percent RAM overclock—and since the core is likely to play a bigger role in most games we’re looking at, this represents as big of a jump as going from GTX 970 to GTX 980, or from the 980 to the 980 Ti. All for free, thanks to the magic of overclocking.
Except few things in life are truly “free,” and the cost with overclocking comes in two forms. First, no matter what anyone tries to tell you, there is always a bit of risk involved with pushing computer hardware beyond the prescribed limits. We’re all big boys and girls at Maximum PC, and more than willing to take that risk, but we have had components fail on us in the past. Never say “never.” The added stress on the hardware can also cause fans to fail sooner than they otherwise might—just ask any reformed Bitcoin miner how many GPU fans they killed.
The second cost is less of a concern for enthusiasts: power and noise. Power requirements scale linearly with clock speed and quadratically with voltage (P≈cV 2f). Since overclocking increases both frequency and voltage, power use can go up quite a bit. More power use means more heat to dissipate, so fans have to spin faster, and that makes your system noisier. It also means potentially higher electricity bills, but not as much as you might think. To wit, even if you use 100W extra and play games for eight hours every day for an entire year—as a pro gamer or living in your mama’s basement, we won’t judge!—that’s only $30–$60 for most US residents. Skip eating out a couple of times and you’re set. But we’ll check power requirements regardless.
What’s Hot, What’s Not & Final Thoughts
This is where you can fast forward to the final section of the review, and get a quick recap and points on the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+.
What’s Hot
EVGA’s Slick Style: EVGA’s video cards have always looked great, but the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ is the cherry on top of all GTX 980 Ti cards. It makes me blush when I look at it.
Incredible Performance: The reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is already one of the best video cards on the market, keeping up with and sometimes beating its bigger brother in the Titan X, but EVGA manages to squeeze even more out of it with the GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+.
Silence is Bliss: The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+, just like its reference cousin, makes zero noise 99% of the time. The only time I even heard a peep out of the GM200-powered video card was when I manually turned the fan up to 100%. When do you do that, boy does the card get loud — but also very cool.
Huge Overclocking Headroom: The card is powerful enough as it is, but holy hell does it have some overclocking potential.
What’s Not
Nothing: EVGA has made a near perfect product with the GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+… I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Class from the box, to the card, and right down to the look and the performance.
Final Thoughts
Dammit EVGA, why do you have to continue to impress me with each product you release? I don’t see me ever being able to rate an EVGA product at anything less than stellar, but that’s what EVGA does right — it releases kick ass, crème-of-the-crop products that consumers know will be next to perfect.
From the get-go, EVGA provides you with a great package, and with their history, you know you’re going to get a great product. This is one of the fastest GM200-powered cards on the market, worth of every single penny. The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ is no exception, with it being one of the best GTX 980 Ti cards on the market. It looks great, performs even better, and has some truly world-class warranty and support behind it from the team at EVGA.
Overclocking, Power Consumption and Sound Testing
Overclocking — Let’s See How Far We Can Go
With EVGA already clocking up its GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+, we didn’t expect to be able to push the card much higher… but we were wrong. With some tame overclocks applied, we were able to reach 1356MHz on the Boost Clock, and 7204MHz on the RAM.
This provided a nice increase in performance, and with the performance on the card already offering around 10% more than the reference GTX 980 Ti, the added performance is nothing but gravy. When it comes to the performance benefit, we have some great results to share.
Power Consumption
As we expected, the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ consumes just a little more power than the reference GTX 980 Ti.
With the reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti in our system, we’re looking at 360W of power consumption, while the overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ bumps that up by 20W to 380W total.
Sound Testing
For all of our testing, the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ was silent. The only time we heard the card was during our sound testing when we manually increased the fan speed to 100%.
Benchmarks — 1080p
Battlefield 4
This is one game that we did differently, as it does not feature a built-in benchmarking feature. When it comes to Battlefield 4, there are countless ways you can benchmark it. Some find a spot in the single player campaign which is easily repeatable, and use that. For our testing, we’ve chosen to use a 64-player online multiplayer server for real-time performance statistics.
We joined a 64-player map and played for five minutes using FRAPS, pulling our minimum/average and maximum FPS. We did this for each test, we run the game for 5 minutes at 1080p/1440p and 4K two times each. One time with Medium settings, and another with a custom Ultra preset (disabling AA). It’s time consuming, but it gives us a perfect look into true real-world performance.
And again, this time with the Ultra preset.
Introduction, Quick Specs and Availability & Price
EVGA is a huge fan favorite amongst PC enthusiasts and gamers, with their kick ass work on virtually every product they release. The company is at the very peak of quality, with every product that the company releases being a top-class product. The EVGA brand is one of the strongest in the world amongst the enthusiast and PC community, but their video cards are a special part of the enthusiast community, with one of the most wanted cards on the market right now, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti from NVIDIA, has been released by EVGA in the form of the GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+.
VIEW GALLERY — 60 IMAGES
EVGA has a mountain of GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards, with the Hydro Copper, HYBRID, Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ (the one we have here), Superclocked, Superclocked ACX 2.0+, the reference 980 Ti from EVGA, and the ACX 2.0+. So seven different variants, with the Superclocked ACX 2.0+ we have here today being the third fastest card that EVGA offers from its range of 980 Ti cards.
Quick Specs
EVGA has ramped up the Base and Boost Clocks on their Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ card, up from the 1000Mhz on the reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti to 1102MHz on the Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+. The Boost Clock on the reference card is 1075MHz, while EVGA bumps it up to 1190Mhz.
The 6GB of GDDR5 is still clocked at 7GHz over its 384-bit memory bus, providing 336.5GB/sec memory bandwidth. The reference GTX 980 Ti has a Texture Fill Rate of 176GT/s, while the EVGA card increases this up to 194GT/s, thanks to its factory overclock.
Availability & Price
At the time of writing, EVGA’s website was the only place you can buy the GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX2.0+ card, with a price of $679.99. This makes it the most expensive GTX 980 Ti that EVGA offers, except for the GTX 980 Ti HYBRID which comes with a massive watercooler, or the GTX 980 Ti Hydro Copper, which is built for watercooling.
The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX2.0+ is the best GTX 980 Ti that EVGA has on its slate, with the ACX 2.0+ cooler on board.
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin smashes benchmark records with 2,200MHz overclock!
EVGA’s custom graphics cards have traditionally featured fairly high overclocks over reference speeds, but how far can they be pushed? Scarily far, as it turns out. EVGA today revealed that the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin had managed to hit a whopping 2,200MHz overclock on liquid nitrogen cooling, more than double the 1,000MHz reference clock.
The GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin was paired with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor, an EVGA X99 Micro2 motherboard, and EVGA SuperNOVA power supply. In 3DMark Fire Strike, it managed to achieve a stratospheric score of 27,861, nearly double the 14,333 that we observed in our review on the reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
A similar doubling of the score was observed in Fire Strike Extreme, where the Kingpin managed a score of 14,432, which incidentally, is still higher than the Fire Strike score we got on our reference card.
In Fire Strike Ultra, it posted a score of 7,736, putting it in the range of numbers we’re more used to seeing in Fire Strike Extreme.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, these are currently the single-card world records for 3DMark. However, it looks like the Intel Core i7-5960X has been overclocked as well to around 5.7GHz, so that probably contributed to the scores as well. Nevertheless, 3DMark scores are determined primarily by the graphics processing heft, so the record-breaking scores are still very much a product of the 2,200MHz overclock.
This is a card that has overclocking in its DNA. It is powered by two 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connectors and sports a 14+3 digital power phase design. In addition, to further drive home the fact that this is no ordinary custom card, EVGA has implemented a new way of purchasing for it. Believe it or not, the card is available at four different price tiers, depending on the approximate GPU ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) quality, or overclocking performance. Every piece of silicon varies in overclocking potential, and EVGA is now giving you the option to literally buy more overclocking headroom.
Of course, this is all just quantified in terms of overclocking potential, and EVGA is not guaranteeing any specific overclocking performance.
The GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin starts at US$849.99 for 72% ASIC quality, and goes all the way up to S$1049.99 for 80%. For a look at the other options, you can head over the EVGA’s website here.
And if you’re interested, you can also check the ASIC quality of your own card in GPU-Z by right clicking on the title bar and clicking “Read ASIC quality”.
