If you have £600 burning a hole in your pocket then perhaps today's review product may interest you. The Gigabyte GTX980 Ti XTREME Gaming is a custom, heavily overclocked graphics card which features a semi passive three fan ‘Windforce' cooler. With a 12+2 Phase Power implementation and proprietary backplate, the XTREME has been clearly designed to push frame rates as high as possible.
The Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce is a hefty beast of a card – shipping with an all metal enclosure incorporating three large bladed fans – Gigabyte claim this cooler can cope with 700W of heat. Gigabyte have also adopted a LN2 mode switch on the PCB to unlock voltage and power limits – this is supplemented with an additional power connector.
GPU | GeForce GTX960 |
Geforce GTX970 | GeForce GTX980 |
Geforce GTX 980 Ti | Geforce GTX Titan X |
Streaming Multiprocessors | 8 | 13 | 16 | 22 | 24 |
CUDA Cores | 1024 | 1664 | 2048 | 2816 | 3072 |
Base Clock | 1126 mhz | 1050 mhz | 1126 mhz | 1000 mhz | 1000 mhz |
GPU Boost Clock | 1178 mhz | 1178 mhz | 1216 mhz | 1075 mhz | 1076 mhz |
Total Video memory | 2GB | 4GB | 4GB | 6GB | 12GB |
Texture Units | 64 | 104 | 128 | 176 | 192 |
Texture fill-rate | 72.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec | 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 176 Gigatexels/Sec | 192 Gigatexels/Sec |
Memory Clock | 7010 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz |
Memory Bandwidth | 112.16 GB/sec | 224 GB/s | 224 GB/sec | 336.5 GB/sec | 336.5 GB/sec |
Bus Width | 128bit | 256bit | 256bit | 384bit | 384bit |
ROPs | 32 | 56 | 64 | 96 | 96 |
Manufacturing Process | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
TDP | 120 watts | 145 watts | 165 watts | 250 watts | 250 watts |
The Nvidia GTX980 Ti ships with 2816 CUDA cores and 22 SM units. The memory subsystem of the GTX980 Ti consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.
The Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce has received a clock boost over Nvidia’s reference card, with final speeds set at 1,216mhz (core)/1,317mhz (boost). The memory is boosted from reference speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective) to 1,800 mhz (7,2Gbps effective).
For the last couple of weeks we have been retesting many graphics cards with the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers and have made the switch to the 64 bit Windows 10 operating system as well. We compare the Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce against a plethora of high end solutions, including, but not limited to the AMD Fury X, Nvidia Titan X, Nvidia Titan Z, AMD R9 295X2, Nvidia GTX980 Ti, AMD R9 390X and AMD R9 390.