GeForce GTX 980 Ti Round-Up With MSI, ASUS, And EVGA

Name: GeForce GTX 980 Ti Round-Up Review: MSI, ASUS, and EVGA
Brand: GeForce

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 09:34 AM EDT

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard powered by an Intel Core i7-5960X octal-core processor and 16GB of Corsair DDR4 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure optimal memory performance and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-5960X
(3GHz, Octa-Core)
Asus X99 Deluxe
(Intel X99 Chipset)

Radeon R9 Fury
Radeon R9 Fury X
ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 980 Ti
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC+
MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6Gi
GeForce GTX 980 Ti (Reference)

16GB Corsair DDR4-2133
OCZ Vertex 4
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64
AMD Catalyst v15.20 Beta
NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v355.98

Benchmarks Used:
Unigine Heaven v4
3DMark "Fire Strike"
Thief
MIddle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor
Metro Last Light Redux
GTA V
FRAPS

Unigine Heaven v4.0 Benchmark

Pseudo-DirectX 11 Gaming

Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v4.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering.

Unigine Heaven

You're going to see a trend in all of our numbers from this point forward--the GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards all perform as you'd expect them too, based on their clock speeds, which is to say the highest clocked card (the ASUS STRIX) leads in overall performance. As you can see in these Unigine Heaven results, the deltas separating the factory overclocked cards is relatively small, but they're significantly faster than the reference card and smoke the Fury X in this test.

Tags: Nvidia, Asus, MSI, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, evga, strix, 980 ti

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com