Power, Temperature, & Noise

As always, last but not least is our look at power, temperature, and noise. Next to price and performance of course, these are some of the most important aspects of a GPU, due in large part to the impact of noise. All things considered, a loud card is undesirable unless there’s a sufficiently good reason – or sufficiently good performance – to ignore the noise.

As the GM200 flagship card, GTX Titan X gets the pick of the litter as far as GM200 GPUs go. GTX Titan X needed fully-functional GM200 GPUs, and even then needed GPUs that were good enough to meet NVIDIA’s power requirements. GTX 980 Ti on the other hand, as a cut-down/salvage card, gets second pick. So we expect to see these chips be just a bit worse; to have either functional units that came out of the fab damaged, or have functional units that have been turned off due to power reasons.

GeForce GTX Titan X/980 Voltages
GTX Titan X Boost Voltage GTX 980 Ti Boost Voltage GTX 980 Boost Voltage
1.162v 1.187v 1.225v

Looking at voltages, we can see just that in our samples. GTX 980 Ti has a slightly higher boost voltage – 1.187v – than our GTX Titan X. NVIDIA sometimes bins their second-tier cards for lower voltage, but this isn’t something we’re seeing here. Nor is there necessarily a need to bin in such a manner since the 250W TDP is unchanged from GTX Titan X.

GeForce GTX 980 Ti Average Clockspeeds
Game GTX 980 Ti GTX Titan X
Max Boost Clock 1202MHz 1215MHz
Battlefield 4
1139MHz
1088MHz
Crysis 3
1177MHz
1113MHz
Mordor
1151MHz
1126MHz
Civilization: BE
1101MHz
1088MHz
Dragon Age
1189MHz
1189MHz
Talos Principle
1177MHz
1126MHz
Far Cry 4
1139MHz
1101MHz
Total War: Attila
1139MHz
1088MHz
GRID Autosport
1164MHz
1151MHz
Grand Theft Auto V
1189MHz
1189MHz

The far more interesting story here is GTX 980 Ti’s clockspeeds. As we have pointed out time and time again, GTX 980 Ti’s gaming performance trails GTX Titan X by just a few percent, this despite the fact that GTX 980 Ti is down by 2 SMMs and is clocked identically. On paper there is a 9% performance difference that in the real world we’re not seeing. So what’s going on?

The answer to that is that what GTX 980 Ti lacks in SMMs it’s making up in clockspeeds. The card’s average clockspeeds are frequently two or more bins ahead of GTX Titan X, topping out at a 64MHz advantage under Crysis 3. All of this comes despite the fact that GTX 980 Ti has a lower maximum boost clock than GTX Titan X, topping out one bin lower at 1202MHz to GTX Titan X’s 1215MHz.

Ultimately the higher clockspeeds are a result of the increased power and thermal headroom the GTX 980 Ti picks up from halving the number of VRAM chips along with disabling two SMMs. With those components no longer consuming power or generating heat, and yet the TDP staying at 250W, GTX 980 Ti can spend its power savings to boost just a bit higher. This in turn compresses the performance gap between the two cards (despite what the specs say), which coupled with the fact that performance doesn't scale lineraly with SMM count or clockspeed (you rarely lose the full theoretical performance amount when shedding frequency or functional units) leads to the GTX 980 Ti trailing the GTX Titan X by an average of just 3%.

Idle Power Consumption

Starting off with idle power consumption, there's nothing new to report here. GTX 980 Ti performs just like the GTX Titan X, which at 74W is second only to the GTX 980 by a single watt.

Load Power Consumption - Crysis 3

Load Power Consumption - FurMark

Meanwhile load power consumption is also practically identical to the GTX Titan X. With the same GPU on the same board operating at the same TDP, GTX 980 Ti ends up right where we expect it, next to GTX Titan X. GTX Titan X did very well as far as energy efficiency is concerned – setting a new bar for 250W cards – and GTX 980 Ti in turn does just as well.

Idle GPU Temperature

Load GPU Temperature - Crysis 3

Load GPU Temperature - FurMark

As was the case with power consumption, video card temperatures are similarly unchanged. NVIDIA’s metal cooler does a great job here, keeping temperatures low at idle while NVIDIA’s GPU Boost mechanism keeps temperatures from exceeding 83C under full load.

Idle Noise Levels

Load Noise Levels - Crysis 3

Load Noise Levels - FurMark

Finally for noise, the situation is much the same. Unexpected but not all that surprising, the GTX 980 Ti ends up doing a hair worse than the GTX Titan X here. NVIDIA has not changed the fan curves or TDP, so this ultimately comes down to manufacturing variability in NVIDIA’s metal cooler, with our GTX 980 Ti faring ever so slightly worse than the Titan. Which is to say that it's still right at the sweet spot for noise versus power consumption, dissipating 250W at no more than 53dB, and once again proving the mettle of NVIDIA's metal cooler.

Compute Overclocking
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  • chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    Yes, its unprecedented to launch a full stack of rebrands with just 1 new ASIC, as AMD has done not once, not 2x, not even 3x, but 4 times with GCN (7000 to Boost/GE, 8000 OEM, R9 200, and now R9 300) Generally it is only the low-end, or a gap product to fill a niche. The G92/b isn't even close to this as it was rebranded numerous times over a short 9 month span (Nov 2007 to July 2008), while we are bracing ourselves for AMD rebrands going back to 2011 and Pitcairn.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    If it's the 4th time as you claim, then by definition, it's most definitely not unprecedented.
  • chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    The first 3 rebrands were still technically within that same product cycle/generation. This rebrand certainly isn't, so rebranding an entire stack with last-gen parts is certainly unprecedented. At least, relative to Nvidia's full next-gen product stack. Hard to say though given AMD just calls everything GCN 1.x, like inbred siblings they have some similarities, but certainly aren't the same "family" of chips.
  • Refuge - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    Thanks Gigaplex, you beat me to it... lol
  • chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    Cool maybe you can beat each other and show us the precedent where a GPU maker went to market with a full stack of rebrands against the competition's next generation line-up. :)
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link

    Nothing like total fanboy denial
  • Kevin G - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    The G92 got its last prebrand in 2009 and was formally replaced on in 2010 by the GTX 460. It had a full three year life span on the market.

    The GTS/GTX 200 series as mostly rebranded. There was the GT200 chip on the high end that was used for the GTX 260 and up. The low end silently got the GT216 for the Geforce 210 a year after the GTX 260/280 launch. At this time, AMD was busy launching the Radeon 4000 series which brought a range of new chips to market as a new generation.

    Pitcairn came out in 2012, not 2011. This would mimic the life span of the G92 as well as the number of rebrands. (It never had a vanilla edition, it started with the Ghz edition as the 7870.)
  • chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link

    @Kevin G, nice try at revisionist history, but that's not quite how it went down. G92 was rebranded numerous times over the course of a year or so, but it did actually get a refresh from 65nm to 55nm. Indeed, G92 was even more advanced than the newer GT200 in some ways, with more advanced hardware encoding/decoding that was on-die, rather than on a complementary ASIC like G80/GT200.

    Also, at the time, prices were much more compacted at the time due to economic recession, so the high-end was really just a glorified performance mid-range due to the price wars started by the 4870 and the economics of the time.

    Nvidia found it was easier to simply manipulate the cores on their big chip than to come out with a number of different ASICs, which is how we ended up with GTX 260 core 192, core 216 and the GTX 275:

    Low End: GT205, 210, GT 220, GT 230
    Mid-range: GT 240, GTS 250
    High-end: GTX 260, GTX 275
    Enthusiast: GTX 280, GTX 285, GTX 295

    The only rebranded chip in that entire stack is the G92, so again, certainly not the precedent for AMD's entire stack of Rebrandeon chips.
  • Kevin G - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link

    @chizow
    Out of that list of GTS/GTX200 series, the new chip in that line up in 2008 was the GT200 and the GT218 that was introduced over a year later in late 2009. For 9 months on the market the three chips used in the 200 series were rebrands of the G94, rebrands of the G92 and the new GT200. The ultra low end at this time was filled in by cards still carrying the 9000 series branding.

    The G92 did have a very long life as it was introduced as the 8800GTS with 512 MB in late 2007. In 2008 it was rebranded the 9800GTX roughly six months after it was first introduced. A year later in 2009 the G92 got a die shrink and rebranded as both the GTS 150 for OEMs and GTS 250 for consumers.

    So yeah, AMD's R9 300 series launch really does mimic what nVidia did with the GTS/GTX 200 series.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link

    G80 was not G92 not G92b nor G94 mr kevin g

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