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

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Like the GeForce GTX Titan X, the 980 Ti is a step forward in terms of high-end GPU efficiency. Despite featuring about a billion additional transistors and a similar sized frame buffer, the 980 Ti consumes a little less power than the original Titan, which was also produced on TSMC's 28nm node. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti offers much better performance than the original Titan, though. In comparison to the Radeon R9 290X, the 980 Ti consumes less power, while offering much higher overall performance.

NVIDIA has put significant resources into designing the coolers in its high-end graphics cards, and it has been paying dividends. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti made a bit more noise than the GTX 980 under load, but its still one of the quietest flagship graphics cards around -- it is clearly quieter than the high-end Radeons. It is not a totally silent solution, however. When under load, the fan will spin up to audible levels.

In terms of temperature, our GeForce GTX 980 Ti sample idled at around 50'C and under load the temperature quickly shot up to its default 83'C target.