Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 19.09.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| We were quite impressed with the new Gigabyte GTX
980 G1 Gaming as it did really good in our tests, had a decent factory
overclock and features a really good custom Windforce 3X 600W triple fan cooler.
The manufacturing quality is also very good and the backplate is definitely
a must when you are looking at a premium graphics card. Apart from that,
the GTX 980 appears to really like clock frequency, meaning we were
really surprise to able to overclock this card all the way up to 1'563
MHz! Keeping in mind that the reference boost clock is set to 1'216 MHz
this means there is still a lot of headroom and overclocking these
cards, even aircooled is a lot of fun and you can squeeze a really
decent boost of your card. The only thing we would like to see improved with this particular card is in regard to the bundle. We'd love to find a few additional goodies, since after all this is a premium card. |
- Performance - Factory Overclocking - Cooling - Design |
-
Bundle - Noise level under load |
|
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| As noted earlier, the Windforce 3X 600W triple-fan
is a capable cooler and it definitely runs circles around any reference
solution. Compared to other custom cooler available these days it can
keep up, but we would love to see the fans spin a slightly lower RPM,
since the GM204 Mawell GPU is not burning away too much power. As far as the noise levels go, the GTX 980 G1 Gaming is very silent in idle but definitely not the most silent card when it comes to noise levels under full loading conditions. |
- Very silent 2D | - Could be quieter under full load | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| The performance is where the GTX 980 G1 Gaming
really shines. It is quite impressive and it actually manages to beat
the reference GTX 780 Ti by almost 25 percent. Quite a substantial part
of the performance story is related to the great factory overclocking,
since the boost clock of this card is 13 percent higher than what you
would get with a reference GTX 980. Compared to a reference GTX 780 Ti
boost clocks are simply on the moon, which explains the massive increase
in performance. The power consumption of the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming is surprisingly high. In idle we noticed that the power consumption of our entire test setup is at 66W. Under load, the new GTX 980 G1 Gaming pulls 366 Watt, which is acutally quite something. |
- Performance | ||
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| This Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming is most certainly going to be amongst the fastest Maxwell based cards. Thanks to a great big factory overclocking Gigabyte is boosting the performance. Apart from that the Windforce 3X 600W cooler is doing a good job. The MSRP of the GTX 980 in general is 549 US-Dollar, which means that the price per FPS is actually rather high. Unfortunately this is always the case when a new generation of graphics cards is being launched. We're quite sure prices are going to drop by quite a bit during the upcoming weeks. |
- Gaming - Overclocking - Enthusiast |
||
| We gave the GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming from Gigabyte 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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