It’s an exciting week here at goldfries and a very long one too as I spend countless running benchmarks for multiple graphic cards and the highlight of the day would be ASUS’ GTX 980 Ti. 😀 I love my job! Well sorry, don’t drop me any E-mails on job openings yet.
And looks like I need not elaborate much as the card is of a reference design, that means it uses a blower type fan for the cooling.
The ASUS GTX 980 Ti is powered by a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCI-E connector.
No backplate for this card, it’s just as vanilla as it is.
The top and bottom of the card is totally card, the blower fan pushes the heat away, exhausting it from the IO connection side of the card.
And that’s all there is to the card, nothing fancy.
Here’s the GPU-Z of the card, more details on the official product page.
Test Setup & Overclocking
| Processor | Intel Core i5-4670K |
| RAM | Kingston HyperX 2x 4GB DDR3 2400Mhz Kit |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-Z97X Gaming 3 |
| Cooler | NZXT Kraken X31 |
| Monitor | BenQ XL2430T |
| Power Supply | FSP AURUM S 600W |
| Casing | NZXT S340 |
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit |
I managed to add 200Mhz to the core clock and 250Mhz to memory clock of the ASUS GTX 980 Ti of which I think is a pretty decent overclock, the results will be included in the benchmarks.
Benchmarks
Unigine Heaven 4.0
*NOTE : Details are set to maximum.
*NOTE : AA disabled in 4K test.
| Card | 1080p (avg) | 4K (avg) |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti | 82.8 | 30 |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti Overclocked | 89.1 | 33 |
| GALAX GTX 980 SOC | 65.4 | 25.7 |
| AMD R9 295X2 | 97.6 | 33.5 |
Metro Last Light
| Card | 1080p (avg) | 4K (avg) |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti | 90.5 | 40.5 |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti Overclocked | 93.5 | 43.5 |
| GALAX GTX 980 SOC | 93.5 | 35.5 |
| AMD R9 295X2 | 73 | 41.5 |
Bioshock Infinite
Settings are at
2 – UltraDX11_DDOF | 2 – Custom | 1 – 16:9 | 4 – 1920×1080
*NO 4K test on this one. Just figured out how to get it to work on 4K after the 980Ti left the lab. Will update when possible.
| Card | 1080p (avg) |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti | 138.26 |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti Overclocked | 145.4 |
| GALAX GTX 980 SOC | 130.71 |
| AMD R9 295X2 | 134.0 |
Shadow of Mordor
| Card | 1080p (avg) | 4K (avg) |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti | 98.74 | 35.01 |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti Overclocked | 105.59 | 37.15 |
| GALAX GTX 980 SOC | 76.56 | 29.03 |
| AMD R9 295X2 | 79.14 | 46.2 |
Temperature
Furmark Burn-in Test was used to stress the card. Fan settings are at Auto. Room set to ~25c.
| Card | Idle(°C) | Load (°C) |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti | 34 | 84 |
| ASUS GTX 980 Ti Full RPM | 30 | 65 |
The fans run sufficiently silent when left at default, hovering at 50% RPM on load. Going at 100% load, the reference cooler is pretty much akin to a hair-dryer.
Power Consumption
The stress was done with Furmark Burn-in Test. Power consumption reading was taken from the watt-meter, actual power draw by the entire system from the wall point. I’m using an FSP Aurum S 700W with 90% efficiency and the estimated system power draw (CPU, not including GPU) during Furmark test is 60w.
| Card | ASUS GTX 980 Ti |
| Furmark Burn-in | 350 |
| Estimated Actual System Draw | 315 |
| Estimated Card Power Draw | 255 |
Guess what – the rated wattage for the GTX 980 Ti is 250w. 🙂 Details on available at Nvidia
The Verdict
The ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB GDDR5 is one awesome card retailing at RM 3,199 which I think is rather steep a price for a reference model. I hate to say it but I believe readers ought to know that there are other reference models with many years of warranty and retails at quite a few hundred RM less.
The difference being that this is ASUS and you’re assured that if anything goes wrong, you have official channels to report to.
Now back to the product – I love it, I think that 6GB VRAM is a great change from the 4GB available on the GTX 980. This makes the GTX 980 Ti a much better option than the GTX 980 when it comes to running multi-card setup.
The GTX 980 Ti makes cards like AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2 obsolete. Load vs Load, the GTX 980 Ti shows wall draw that’s only about half of what I got with the R9 295X2.
The review sample was provided by IdealTech – if you’re looking for this card, you know where to find them.
