The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTThe Test
For the launch of GTX 980 we are using NVIDIA’s press beta drivers for the card, release 334.07 beta. This is the first (semi) public release of the R343 driver set, and coinciding with the release of the Maxwell 2 architecture it also marks the end of support for NVIDIA’s D3D10 GPUs: the 8, 9, 100, 200, and 300 series. Beginning with R343 these products are no longer supported in new driver branches and have been moved to legacy status.
Meanwhile as noted earlier, due to time constraints and hardware problems today we are focusing our coverage on the GTX 980. Next week we will be looking at GTX 980 SLI (hint: it’s fast) and GTX 970.
And on a testing note, as is standard for our reviews we are using our reference Radeon R9 290X for our 290X benchmarks. For this reason we are including both the standard and uber modes for the sake of clarity and completeness. The temperature throttling that the reference 290X suffers from is basically limited to just the reference 290X, as the non-reference/custom models use open air coolers that have no problem dissipating the 290X’s full heat load. Both modes are included for this reason, to demonstrate how a reference 290X performs and how a custom model would perform. At this point you can still buy reference 290X cards, but the vast majority of retail cards will be of the non-reference variety, where the 290X Uber mode’s results will be more applicable.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon R9 290 AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA Release 344.07 Beta AMD Catalyst 14.300.1005 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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takeship - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
The situation we have here now is very reminiscent of AMD's CPU position shortly after Core 2 hit the market. Nvidia now has a product with better performance, better efficiency, better (still) drivers & features, and similar pricing and that puts AMD in a bad way. The 3xx series had better seriously wow, or AMD's GPU division is quickly going to see the same market erosion that happened after Core 2/iCore. Personally, i think this is a knockout blow. - soon to be former 7970 ownerchizow - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Maxwell is truly amazing stuff. Great advances from Nvidia in virtually every aspect.Not super thrilled about the 980 price at $550, the 970 price however is amazing at $329. I was going to go with the 980 but 2x970s seem more appealing. 970 is 13/16 SMXes but it retains the full 4GB, full 256-bit bus, full 64 ROPs. Hopefully there's a lot of 970s on the full 980 PCBs.
Jensen just confirmed the prices on the Live Stream.
shing3232 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
they have efficiency advantage because because they use the best 28nm call hpm. they use high performance mobile process of course they are very efficientnkm90 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
From TSMCs website ( http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/techn... )"The 28nm High Performance Mobile Computing (HPM) provides high performance for mobile applications to address the need for applications requiring high speed. Such technology can provide the highest speed among 28nm technologies. With such higher performance coverage, 28HPM is ideal for many applications from networking, and high-end smartphone/ mobile consumer products."It looks like the hpm process was designed for chips that would dissipate much less than the 150-200W this one does. I seriously doubt someone would use hpm for such high power chips. Also some body had the voltages for the gm204 chip; and the idle voltage was closer to the 0.85V of hp than the 0.9V of HPM
chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
There's no indication they are using 28nm HPM, even the first Maxwell part (GM107) used 28nm HP and alluded to this amazing power/perf ratio we see today with GM104.It is obvious Nvidia's convergence of mobile *design* (not process) fundamentals helped them as we saw with Kepler, and this will only be further beneficial with their mobile Maxwell designs.
Sttm - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Yeah I was looking at 970 results on other sites... its the 8800gt reborn! Almost top end performance, $220 in savings.chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yep the 970 is amazing price:perf, Newegg has them at the $330 price up to $350 for some custom/OC versions.I did end up going with a single 980 though. The difference in build quality is just too much and SLI with my new G-Sync monitor (Swift) have had issues with my current 670 SLI build. The scaling with SLI is also not exceptional with these Maxwell cards (~60%), so the improvement of 2x970 is actually not that much over a single highly overclocked 980.
Still amazing job by Nvidia, the 980 would have been a grand slam at $500 but it is still an Earl Weaver 3-run blast at $550.
uzun - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
When will these cards be available via newegg etc?arbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
i would guess later tonight maybe tomorrow though that might be wrong.chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
They are available on Newegg.com now. Some SKUs are selling out now. I picked up two of the EVGA 980 SuperClocked models.