Reviewed: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN
Page 1: Reviewed: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN
EVGA and Kingpin. These are two names synonymous with very, very fast graphics cards. We don’t even want to lock those two names into just very, very fast NVIDIA graphics cards. Together, EVGA and Vince “K|NGP|N” Lucido have been able to create some of the fastest graphics cards around. While they might only do NVIDIA based graphics cards, they continue to break records outscoring both NVIDIA and AMD offerings. Now, they’re doing it all over again, but what makes it so special this time is that it’s not even with the top NVIDIA model. Instead it’s with the new and highly popular GTX 980 Ti that launched just before Computex this year and sits below the 12GB GTX Titan X.
Since its short time on earth, the GTX 980 Ti has been accepted widely with open arms. The GTX 980 Ti did almost everything the new AMD R9 Fury X didn’t. With plenty of supply, samples ran rampant. Come launch day your favorite review website had a review showing just what the card could do. It was followed up by a retail launch that didn’t have problems with stock and was rounded off by the fact that partners could go crazy with the model, new coolers, new PCBs and massive out of the box overclocks to name just a few of the things partners could do. All this is opposite to what we saw came out of the AMD R9 Fury X. Limited samples and websites being told they had been dropped from the launch, limited supply that still leaves “Out of Stock” labels all over NewEgg.com and a closed design that means we’ve seen nothing but reference cooled models.
Starting at $649 the GTX 980 Ti lines up almost perfectly against the AMD R9 Fury X. While both cards carry the same MSRP, we say almost because a number of R9 Fury X offerings are above the MSRP. Already, though, we’ve seen NVIDIA partners really jump outside this price point. Zotac and its Arctic Storm comes in at $769.99. The ASUS STRIX we looked at just yesterday? While we don’t have an exact price point, based on the euro price of both the ASUS and Zotac offering it’s safe to assume that the ASUS STRIX will hit at the mid-$700 price point.
The price on the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN? Well that starts at $849.99 and climbs to $1049.99. With pre-Binned cards offering ASIC quality of 72%+, 74%+, 76%+ and 80%+, EVGA has launched this new model in four varieties that come in at $849.99, $899.99, $999.99 and $1049.99. Which one is best for you? The chances are the $849.99 one. If you’re going to be overclocking and just making use of the air cooler, all cards should perform extremely similar to each other. With that said, the 80%+ should yield the highest overclock. For air cooling, though, the value of the card drops significantly as you move up in ASIC quality. If you’re aiming to break world records and use LN2, Dry Ice or extreme Water Cooling setups you’re going to want the one you can afford. The higher quality ASIC means a higher chance of a record breaking overclock.
Key Architectural Data
Before we compare the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN with the reference model, we want to say a quick few words about the GPU. The GTX 980 Ti is based on the GM200-GPU with “Maxwell” architecture of the 2nd generation. This offers 2816 shaders, 176 texture units and 96 ROPs. The 6GB of GDDR4 graphics memory is connected via a 384-bit wide memory interface. Unlike AMD, NVIDIA haven’t made use of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) yet, instead we’ll see that next year with their new “Pascal” GPU.
| The technical specifications of the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN at a glance | ||
|---|---|---|
| Model | EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti |
| Street Price | from $849.99 | from $649.99 |
| Homepage | www.evga.com | www.nvidia.com |
| Technical Specifications | ||
| GPU | GM200 (GM200-310-A1) | GM200 (GM200-310-A1) |
| Manufacturing Process | 28 nm | 28 nm |
| Transistors | 8 billion | 8 billion |
| GPU Clock Speed (Base Clock) | 1,203 MHz | 1,000 MHz |
| GPU clock (Boost Clock) | 1,304 MHz | 1,075 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1,750 MHz / 1,775 MHz (OC Mode) | 1,750 MHz |
| Memory Type | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Size | 6 GB | 6 GB |
| Memory Interface | 384 bits | 384 bits |
| Memory Bandwidth | 345.6 GB / s | 336.6 GB / s |
| DirectX version | 12 | 12 |
| Shader Units | 2,816 | 2,816 |
| Texture units | 176 | 176 |
| ROPs | 96 | 96 |
| Typical Board Power | 250 Watt | 250 Watt |
| SLI / Crossfire | SLI | SLI |
Comparing the reference version of the GTX 980 Ti and the EVGA version we’re looking at today you can see the major changes as you’d expect come in the clock speeds. Along with overclocking both the GPU and the memory, EVGA offer two modes when it comes to the memory clock. While EVGA indeed offer an extremely strong out of the box overclock. You don’t buy these cards to run them at stock speeds. If you’re simply interested in having a GTX 980 Ti with a fast out of the box clock, you’d be better off looking at something like the Classified or Superclocked+ version from EVGA.
Looking above we can see the default clocks are just as we mentioned in the previous table. As we mentioned just earlier, though, you don’t buy the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN to run at its stock speed. Instead you’re better off buying something like the upcoming Classified model or the Superclocked+ version.
So with that in mind, we’ll be testing the KINGPIN offering overclocked across all our benchmarks. Looking above you can see we managed to push the core to 1310 MHz which pushes the minimum boost clock to 1411 MHz. As for the 6GB of GDDR memory, we managed to bring that up to 2021 MHz.
Before moving forward to look at the card it’s worth noting that EVGA has opted to make use of Samsung memory here instead of Hynix. Speaking to Vince himself he mentioned that clock for clock the Samsung memory is faster than the Hynix.