Review: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming

Very Good Performance Now nV Fans can move from GTX5xx or 6xx and maby even 7xx to 980 or 970 _> Nicely done and OK price -> 550$ is OK for Hi-End
Like ATI they learn a lesson and Give to fans good hardware and its not Overpriced

Now im waiting for ATI R390X 20nm :bounce:

 

Ridiculous overclockers. Love it!

 

They are very good, but you can notice something I do not like:
in all benchmarks their performance offset is 10 to 20% only (between 970 and 980). What's wrong with it?
GTX980 has 23% more shaders, 23% more TMUs, 7% higher base clock, 3.2% higher boost clock.
Which actually gives 1.23 * 1.05 = 1.29 ~ 29% boost in processing power.
But both cards are defined by amount of ROPs which is great 64. And that is what makes both cards stand out most.
But if nV gave GTX980 72ROPs it would have been much more powerful without drastic increase in GPU size/TDP.
Wonder if 64 ROPs was effective limit for 256bit bus.
If so, then Ti may have 320bit bus. And therefore 5GB of vRAM.

And I would like to see FCAT comparison with 780(Ti) since those had quite improvement over 770.

And one before last thing is price which remains to be seen here. Last one is AMD's response. I may actually upgrade this time to nV even while I do not like company.

 

Hilbert btw, could you load some benchmark which uses a lot of vRAM on 770/780 and then 970/980?
Since there is new compression, vRAM usage should be bit lower. Wonder if that is measurable.
Thanks.

 

IMPRESSIVE. price of 980 is a bit high, close to 780ti but heck it so awesome. the GTX 970 is perfect, price is write power is awesome on both of them.

Maxwell is best thing in GPU that happened in a long time, and i've heard nvidia improved compute as well.

 

To be honest, the G1 gaming looks very nice. Looks big (lots of lovely heatspreader and fin area), three fans should be a bit quieter than two of the same sice, and it is factory overclocked like hell.
I only hope Gigabyte has gone for not that agressive overclocks like with other of their overclocked cards :frown:

 

When are they for sale, I want one!

 

Nice review Hilbert,but can u tell me the price of the GTX 908 G1 card?

 

GTX 980: $549 / 452 EUR (ex VAT) according to his review.

 

Good review as usual Hilbert.

 

G1 looks to be $630 US everywhere I've seen it.

 

Bring on the Titan 2

 

I just ordered one.
Crossing my fingers that it doesn't suffer from the same vram issues the GTX780ti Windforce had..

 

This new cards don`t have the same problem like the 780Ti had and they are massive overclockers.

 

I still have a GTX 680, and right now I'm torn between buying this card, or waiting for a Ti version to come out. I'm still fairly happy with my 680, but trying to use all three of my 27" 1080p monitors for surround gaming puts my framerates lower than easily playable. Gaming in surround is harder when there's noticeable jittering due to lower FPS.

I have no doubt that the GTX 980 would boost my framerates quite a bit in that area, but should I wait for a Ti version with more vRAM? I'm thinking a bit forward with that question, as I'll have whichever card I buy for at least two years.

Also, I'm not looking to go with SLi, at least initially, however that might change with what looks like lower power requirements for the Maxwell chips. I have a 750W power supply. Not sure that can handle SLi even with Maxwell, though.

 

I just ordered one too !!!

 

My PSU has 1x 6power and 1x 8power connector. Will it work?

Whats the best gtx980 offer atm? Im not talking about the classifields which do not exist, but between MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA, which one would you go and why?

 

Is it possible to get a high res shot of the back of the card without the backplate? I want to see if it's using the same voltage controller that the reference cards use (those can't be soft volt modded).