Conclusion

The GTX 980 Ti is Nvidia’s new flagship graphics card. 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. EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC comes with a nice 96MHz GPU overclock which translates up to 8 per cent  performance increase over GTX Titan X.

EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ comes with backplate (therefore the sign ‘+’ after Superclocked). The card is listed on the EVGA web shop for $680, which does not sound like a big price premium (+$30) over EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Ti ACX 2.0+ cards based on a reference clocks and without backplate. We are still looking at the excellent ACX 2.0+ cooler, which keeps the card quiet even during long gaming sessions. The card features idle-fan-off capability and this means the fans are not spinning at all at idle and light loads.

The card is factory overclocked but this does not mean the fun stops there. We rised the GPU clock by additional 140MHz while the Boost clocks went to 1455MHz. The memory produced average results with a total 790MHz (effective GDDR5) but combined with the GPU overclock we gained about 7 per cent performance increase. If you are in overclocking business EVGA has another card for you and that is the GTX 980 Ti Classified Kingpin Edition, with a full copper heatsink and 15-phase VRM circuit.

For most users we recommend GTX 980 Ti SC, with or without backplate it does not matter. EVGA GTX 980 Ti Superclocked 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 EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ we can.

Windows 10 is officially available and you can get it as a free upgrade if you own a genuine version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Microsoft has said that it will roll out the updates in waves and there is no way to know when it will be your turn. We have tested the EVGA card under Windows 10, and it runs smoothly. There is no performance increase or decrease compared to previous systems. If you are gamer and you want to upgrade from Windows 7/8 we suggest to do a clean install. Just download Windows 10 ISO file and do it standard way. You need the  MediaCreationTool, and this tool offers to upgrade your windows or create an ISO file.