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Gainward GTX 980 Ti Phoenix Golden reviewed

by on15 September 2015

Index

Conclusion

The GTX 980 Ti is Nvidia’s new flagship graphics card, and it is already established as one of the the best gaming graphics cards. The GTX 980 Ti is based on the 28nm GM200 GPU, which is used on the GTX Titan X graphics card. While the number of CUDA cores was reduced and the amount of memory was cut down to 6GB, the number of ROPs, amount of L3 cache and the memory interface remained the same as the Titan X. In games there is little  difference between the two. With slight GPU clock increase, the GTX 980 Ti manages to be faster in games than GTX Titan X. Gainward GTX 980 Ti Phoenix Golden Sample comes with a nice 152MHz GPU overclock which translates up to nine per cent  performance increase over GTX Titan X, and about 11% increase over the reference GTX 980 Ti.

The GTX 980Ti Phoenix Golden Sample card is available for €700. This is relatively good price if we take into account the price of competing GTX 980 Ti cards. It is not a big price premium (+€20) over Gainward Geforce GTX 980 Ti card based on a reference clock. Also it is €300 cheaper than GTX Titan X.

Gainward went with a new cooler design which was good. The Phoenix cooler features idle-fan-off capability and this means the fans are not spinning at all at idle and light loads. Also the cooler keeps the card quiet even during long gaming sessions. The card is factory overclocked but this does not mean the fun stops there. We raised the GPU clock by additional 140MHz and the fans were still quiet.

The GTX 980 Ti is the right card to experience a whole new class of the performance enhanced gaming environment. The user can freely experiment with all the new Nvidia features including hyper-realistic real-time global illumination with advanced NVIDIA VXGI, as well as NVIDIA G-SYNC display technology.

Gainward GTX 980 Ti Superclocked Golden Sample is faster than GTX Titan X but is considerably cheaper. Until recently is was impossible to play games smoothly at 4K resolution, but with the last generation of the high end cards, including Phoenix card we can. In other words the GTX 980 Ti Phoenix Golden Sample has enough under the hood to drive whatever comes next.

fudz recommended ny


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Last modified on 15 September 2015
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