The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTOverclocking
Finally, no review of a high-end video card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.
From a design standpoint, GTX 980 Ti already ships close to its power limits. NVIDIA’s 250W TDP can only be raised another 10% – to 275W – meaning that in TDP limited scenarios there’s not much headroom to play with. On the other hand with the stock voltage being relatively low, in clockspeed limited scenarios there’s still some room for pushing the performance envelope through overvolting. And neither of these options addresses the most potent aspect of overclocking, which is pushing the entire clockspeed curve higher at the same voltages by increasing the clockspeed offsets.
GTX Titan X by comparison ended up being a good overclocker, and while we'd expect GTX 980 Tis to use slightly lower quality chips as part of the binning process, it should still overclock rather well.
GeForce GTX 980 Ti Overclocking | ||||
Stock | Overclocked | |||
Core Clock | 1000MHz | 1250MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1075Mhz | 1326MHz | ||
Max Boost Clock | 1202MHz | 1477MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 7GHz | 8GHz | ||
Max Voltage | 1.187v | 1.23v |
Overall we're able to get another 250MHz (25%) out of the GTX 980 Ti's GPU, and another 1GHz (14%) out of its VRAM. This pushes the GTX 980 Ti's clockspeeds up to 1326MHz for the standard boost clock, and 1477MHz for the maximum boost clock. The card is heavily TDP limited at this point, so it's unlikely to sustain clockspeeds over 1400MHz, but working clockspeeds in the 1300MHz range are certainly sustainable. Meanwhile interestingly enough, this is actually a slightly better overclock than what we saw with the GTX Titan X; the Titan was only able to get another 200MHz out of its GPU and 800MHz out of its memory. So GTX 980 Ti ends up being the better overclocker by 50MHz.
The gains from this overclock are a very consistent across all 5 of our sample games at 4K, with the average performance increase being 20%. Though not quite enough to push the GTX 980 Ti above 60fps in Shadow of Mordor or Crysis 3, it is enough to crack 60fps on Battlefield 4 and The Talos Principle.
The cost of that 20% overclock in terms of power and noise is similarly straightforward. You're looking at an increased power cost of 30W or so at the wall – in-line with the 25W increase in the card’s TDP – while on the noise front the GTX 980 Ti is pushed out of its sweet spot. Card noise levels will increase by around 4.5dB(A).
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madwolfa - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
No, it has full access.MapRef41N93W - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
It has the full ROPs. The memory is tied to the ROPs which is why the 970 had it's issue.RaistlinZ - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Ryan, did you guys fully test the amount of full-speed VRAM on this 980Ti? Is all 6GB running at full speed and not just 5.5GB or some such nonesense? Have you tested actual in game VRAM usage and seen it reach 6GB? Thanks. :)madwolfa - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/206956-nvidia-g... confirmed by nvidia that full memory access is availableo-k - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
that's what they said last time.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
No they didn't say anything and 6 months later...This time they said something beforehand, I'm sure they are lying, so I agree with you.
My tinfoil is failing one moment I'm receiving a transmission from beta reticuli.
Ah yes, it's confirmed, nVidia is lying, again, the memory is hosed on the 980ti...
This message will self destruct in 5 seconds wether or not you've accepted the mission o-k.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Yep. We've checked."Just to be sure we checked to make sure the ROP/MC configuration of GTX 980 Ti was unchanged at 96 ROPs"
None of the ROP/MC partitions have been disabled, and all 3MB of L2 cache is available.
jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Makes the 980 a very hard sell even at 499$, they should have dropped it to 449$ or even slightly less. The TI is so much faster and the 970 is so much cheaper.Yojimbo - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I think it should have been dropped to $250, but that's just me. When price premiums are not linear with performance increases, people complain the higher priced card is overpriced, and when they are, people complain the lower priced card is overpriced. Best solution: All cards $0.jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I wasn't complaining, i was commenting on their strategy and your childish comment is just inappropriate.