PNY GTX980 Ti XLR8 OC

We got one of the first samples of the PNY GTX980 Ti XLR8 OC and it doesn't actually look like the box artwork is finished – no product name/category is listed on the front.

All our box contained was a simple power converter cables, nothing else.


The PNY GTX980 Ti XLR8 OC (‘Accelerate‘ – get it?) is quite a nice looking card, with sporty yellow stripes running the full length of the cooler, between the three fans. PNY branding is seen on the fans. Surprisingly this is the only GTX980 Ti we have reviewed to date without a custom backplate fitted to the rear of the PCB.

This is generally not a good sign as hot spots are likely to appear on the PCB -we will measure this with our thermal imaging camera later in the review.

Many of the Nvidia partners have opted for a dual 8 pin PCI e power cable configuration however PNY have decided to reduce the power intake to 1 x 6 pin and 1x 8 pin layout. The PNY card is capable of SLI in 2,3 and 4 way configurations.

The PNY card ships with a single DVI-D port. There are three DisplayPorts 1.2 and a single HDMI 2.0 port along the bottom of the I/O plate. If you wish, you can use all these ports at the same time for triple monitor gaming. HDMI 2.0 is supported, so you are able to get 60hz at 4K resolutions, without the need for any adapters.

The PNY cooler is comprised of 4 thick heatpipes  which run the full length of the card, into not two but three separate heatsinks.

An overview of the hardware in the latest version of GPUz – as discussed on the previous page. This overclocked GM200 core runs at 1165mhz (1,266mhz boost) and is built on the 28nm process. The GTX980 Ti has 96 ROPs, 176 Texture units (Titan X has 192 texture units) and 2,816 CUDA Cores (Titan X has 3,072 CUDA Cores). The 6GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1753mhz (7Gbps effective) and is connected via a 384 bit memory interface.

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