NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review: A Cheaper Titan X Arrives

We spent a little bit of time overclocking the GeForce GTX 980 Ti to see what kind of additional frequency headroom its huge 8 billion transistor GPU had left under the hood. For these tests, we used the latest edition of EVGA's Precision X GPU tweaking utility, which is designed to work with the new card.

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EVGA's Precision X Tweaking Utility Running On The GeForce GTX Titan X

Overclocking a Maxwell-based GeForce GTX series graphics card requires a bit more tweaking then previous-gen products, due to all of the new options available and the complexities associated with GPU Boost. Sometimes, you’ll find that increasing a particular voltage or frequency may appear to function properly, when in fact performance decreases due to errors or throttling. You may also find that the actual GPU Boost clock may travel above or below the designated offset value when the power and/or temperature targets are also increased.

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EVGA Precision X Overclocked Data

To push the GTX 980 Ti's clock much higher than stock, we increased the power and temperature targets to 110% and 91'C, respectively, and also increased the GPU and Memory clock offsets by 185MHz and 160MHz and re-ran a few tests. These settings were perfectly stable for us.

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When all was said and done, our GeForce GTX 980 Ti's GPU overclocked from a peak, stock boost frequency of 1075MHz on up to an impressive 1387MHz. We re-ran a couple of benchmarks at 4K and saw some marginal performance increases in both. With more tweaking of frequencies, voltages, and the fan curve, we suspect the GeForce GTX 980 Ti can be pushed even higher. It's going to be interesting to see what NVIDIA's board partners come up with in terms of factory overclocked cards...


Marco Chiappetta

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

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