EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked

Not long ago we did a first review of the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ which we of course loved because who cannot love a card with that much power? Today we are following up with another EVGA card, the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked. It is almost the same card as the previous one as it has the same clock speeds. The big difference is that this card uses the reference design while the Superclocked + ACX 2.0 uses a dual-fan-configuration. In this review we will focus on the performance difference against a high-end GTX 980-card (the pre-overclocked Zotac AMP! Omega-edition card) and specifically how it handles 2560×1440 and 4K-resolutions.

Since my collegue Mark already wrote a nice intro for the GTX 980 Ti I am going to re-use it here as it of course is just as true for this card.

Filling a slot between the Nivida Titan X and the GTX 980 the EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC features 8 Billion Transistors a core clock of 1102 MHz, 2816 shaders, 176 Texture units and 96 ROPs 6GB of GDDR5 memory riding a 384-bit bus. In short it’s Nerd Candy of the sweetest kind. It is pushing 768 more shaders than the GTX 980, 32 more ROPs, 128-bit wider bus width and an having an additional 2 GB GDDR5.On the flip side of that equation the Nvidia Titan X gets 256 more shaders than the EVGA GTX 980 Ti, 16 more texture units, the same amount of ROPs, the same 384-Bit Bus but gets double the GDDR5 at 12 GB.

What does all that add up to? The EVGA GTX 980Ti is a lot closer to the power of the Titan X than the GTX 980 is. Now don’t get us wrong, the GTX 980 is one powerful card and we wouldn’t kick 3 of them out of our test bed by any means but a single EVGA GTX 980Ti is enough to game at 4k resolution with the Titan X and everything else we’ve seen struggles with 4k gaming. Given the choice of GTX 980 SLI or the EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC ACX 2.0+ we’d pick the EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC ACX 2.0+ hands down. The Scaling in SLI might pick up with Windows 10 and DirectX 12 but scaling still won’t be 100% so we prefer single powerful GPU’s but don’t have anything against running a secondary GPU for Physx..

With DirectX 12 coming out in full force later this year (Late July with Windows 10) DirectX 12 promises to be a game changer for PC enthusiasts. Right now the only way to take advantage of that game changing is an Nvidia 900 series GPU. AMD will shortly release its new R9 300 lineup rumored to have HBM GDDR5 and it’s an exciting time in the GPU arena, so exciting it sends this Geek into trembling frenzies thinking about the possibilities.

Compared to a GeForce Titan X Nvidia choose to slice away two streaming multiprocessors with 256 CUDA cores leaving you with 2816 CUDA cores. We also loose 16 Texture units meaning that we “only” get 176 Texture units compared to the 200 you get in a Titan X.

If you already read the previous review of the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ you will notice that this chart is exactly the same. In fact I copied it directly from that review. As mentioned before the difference between the EVGA GeForce GTSX 980 Ti Superclocked and the EVGA GeForce GTSX 980 Ti Superclocked ACX 2.0+ is the design and the dual fans. Everything else looks the same including the specifications and the price.