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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kyuu - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Witcher 3 runs just fine on my single 290. Is it just the xfire profile? Do you have the new driver and latest patches? Also, have you turned down tesselation or turned off hairworks?PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
4K... was hoping my U28D590D will have freesync, but alas... no such luck. I am very sensitive to stutter, it gives me motion sickness, to the point I have to stop playing :(limiting hairworks to 8x does help, but I really dislike the hair without it. I rather wait for 15.5.1 or 15.6. I have other games to keep me busy for a while.
I can get 45 avg if I drop to 21:9 ratio using 2840 x 1646, but even then I still get motion sickness from the occasional drops.
chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Yes CrossFire support of TW3 is broken from Day1, its a well-known issue. AMD hastily released a driver last week with a CF profile, but its virtually unusable as it introduces a number of other issues with AA and flickering icons.PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
15.5 no longer flickers with or without AA. still slow though.chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Are you sure? Did they release a follow-up to the 15.5 Beta? Because the notes and independent user feedback stated there was still flickering:*The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - To enable the best performance and experience in Crossfire, users must disable Anti-Aliasing from the games video-post processing options. Some random flickering may occur when using Crossfire. If the issue is affecting the game experience, as a work around we suggest disabling Crossfire while we continue to work with CD Projekt Red to resolve this issue
Peichen - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
295X2 is indeed faster but it also uses twice as much power. You have to take the 1000W PSU into account as well as one or two additional 120mm fans that's needed to get the heat out the case. When you add up all the extra cost for PSU, fans, electricity, noise and stutter against an overclocked 980Ti (last few pages of review), the slight speed advantage aren't going to be worth it.Also, Maxwell 2 supports DirectX 12, I am not so sure about any of the current AMD/ATI cards since they were designed in 2013.
xthetenth - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
You don't have to buy a new PSU every time you buy a high TDP card, but otherwise a valid point. Going multi-GPU for the same performance requires a much bigger price difference to be worth it vs. a single card.Kutark - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Basically you're gonna spend an extra $5/mo on electricity with that card, or $60/yr vs a 980ti. thats actually pretty huge. Thats at 4hrs/day of gaming, at an average of 12c/kwh. If you game 6 or 7 hours a day, its even worse.These high power cards are a little ridiculous. 600w just for one video card?!!
Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I had a GTX690, and I run SLI TITAN X. Dual GPU IS a hindrance. You'd have to be blind, stupid, or a rabid fanboy to claim otherwise. The 295x2 isn't exempt from that just because you dislike NV and harbor a not so secret love for AMD.Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I had a GTX690, and I run SLI TITAN X. Dual GPU IS a hindrance. You'd have to be blind, stupid, or a rabid fanboy to claim otherwise. The 295x2 isn't exempt from that just because you dislike NV and harbor a not so secret love for AMD.