PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB

PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Introduction Introduction Very recently we took a long hard look at the PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8 4GB video card and walked away extremely impressed with what we found. However, while very good for a x70 video card, the PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8 4GB merely whetted our appetite for the real deal: the 'Maxwell' GeForce GTX 980. To satisfy this need for speed, we were able to obtain a PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB to see what the best NVIDIA has to offer right now could do - instead of just surmising it based on the 970. Unlike the x70 series, the x80 series has always been - and always will be - about being an enthusiasts 'flagship' model. Historically this meant ideals such as performance per dollar takes a backseat to shear performance abilities, and consumers looking for the best 'value' are probably not the consumers interested in a x80 video card. In the past this also meant consumers looking for a low noise, low power video card need not apply as the top of the NVIDIA lineup was simply not intended to offer both performance and efficiency. Reference x80 series cards always consumed copious amount of power and took a brute force approach to increasing performance. In other words, if you wanted an NVIDIA card with the biggest core count ever seen in a single GPU solution it was a GeForce GTX x80 that you wanted. As the direct successor to GeForce GTX 780, the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB breaks with tradition and represents a change in direction for NVIIDA and by extension PNY. While yes this is a reference GTX 980 card, and while yes it does cost $550 (or $220 more than the PNY 970 XLR8), these are the only things it shares common with its predecessor's design philosophy. To put it simply, instead of the tried and true brute force approach the new PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 takes a different path, a path of refinement and efficiency - it is a rapier to 780's saber. This new approach means combining fewer CUDA cores and texture units, with higher frequencies and a higher ROP count. This combination seemingly promises the impossible and this new 165 watt TDP 165 watts video card offers even higher performance than what a 250 watt TDP'ed GTX 780Ti can offer. As such, for the first time in a long time consumers do not need as heavy duty a power supply as they can afford - the recommended min is now only 500 watts. However, increased performance and power efficiency is not the only things that the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB brings to the table. Because this card uses a heatsink very reminiscent of the one which accompanies the stock PNY GTX 780 XLR8, the new PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB promises to be even cooler and quieter running than past x80 series video cards. Then to seal the deal PNY has given this their 'standard' lifetime warranty. On the surface this is indeed a lot of good things in a relatively small package; however as a flagship model, the performance does indeed have to live up to expectations as at the end of the day this video card is an enthusiast grade card and needs to live up to its predecessors standards! PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Specs and Features Specifications and Features PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Closer Look A Closer Look at the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB With the exception of the model listed on the side, the shipping container for PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB is the exact same as what ships with the 970, 780, 750Ti, 750, and nearly every other PNY NVIDIA video card we have looked at in the past. This does make it very tedious to sort through if you have multiple PNY video cards, and are trying to RMA a certain card! On the positive side this shipping container is small, elegant and doesn’t take up much room so you will have no excuse if you lose it. When you remove the internal packaging from the shipping container you can see that PNY has also one again opted for a plastic enclosure that is basically the same as the ones used in every other PNY video card. Needless to say PNY loves cutting costs wherever they can and passing that savings on to you. More importantly, unlike the exterior, we have no issues with that as this clear top and white bottomed plastic enclosure reduces the chances of damage to the card while in transit. The included accessories are also classic PNY through and through. In grand total you get a single 6pin PCI-e adapter, a single digital to analog port adapter, a quick start guide, a CD with the necessary drivers, and as a nice little bonus you get a mini-HDMI to full size HDMI adapter. For its time the 780 reference card was a major feat of engineering as it did run cooler than its predecessors; however with a TDP of 250 watts it still required heavy duty cooling and heavy duty power supplies. The PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 has TDP of only 165 watts. The PNY GeForce GTX 780 XLR8 has 2304 CUDA cores which was a 50% boost over the 680's 1536 core count. A PNY GTX 780 has a texture unit count of 192 and this was 50% more than a GTX 680s. The new PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 makes use of only 2048, or 11% fewer CUDA cores than the GTX 780. The PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 only has 128 texture units. Even more eyebrow raising is the memory bus has been downsized from 384-bit wide bus to a 256-bit bus. Yet this combination of fewer cores and texture units on a narrower memory bus promises to be more powerful than what the 780 core could do. NVIDIA was able to do this because the Maxwell core is not a rehash of previous designs, instead they redesigned their architecture with a holistic approach in mind. Instead of simply throwing more power at the problem they not only made each Cuda core more efficient but also much faster. Instead of a maximum 'boost' speed of 900Mhz, these 2048 CUDA cores run at a base speed of 1126 which can be boosted to 1216Mhz. This in conjunction with the refinements NIVIDA has baked into each 'Cuda core' is why consumers cannot really compare them to the previous generation solely on a number basis. It would be like comparing an Intel 4th generation Core i7 CPU to a 3rd Generation Core i7 in that each new Cuda core is simply better than its predecessor. While yes the texture units have been reduced to 128, these two have been upgraded and refined and once again simply looking at paper specifications does not tell the whole story. More importantly the Raster Operation Pipeline 'ROP' Count has been boosted from 48 to 64. The ROP subsystem is actually what handles the 'eye candy' (such as Anti-Aliasing) to the stream and then handles the actual writing of each pixel to the output buffer. These ROPs are also improved over the last generation at it is these improvements, in addition to all the others, that should allow for higher frame rates instead of simply higher specifications . Turning our attention to the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 itself we can see that while it is indeed a 'reference' blower style equipped GTX 980, PNY has pulled out all the stops. If anything this new reference 980 is even prettier to look at than the reference PNY GTX 780 was. Not only does this 'reference' blower have the same dimensions as the previous 780's reference blower, but PNY has actually increased the 'wow' factor but upgrading the amount of chrome that attaches to it! While these noticeably improved aesthetics are certainly appreciated, what is much more impressive is what is hidden underneath all this metal & plastic fascia. For all intents and purposes PNY has bestowed this 165 watt TDP video card with the same beefy copper heatpipe and massive fin array cooler that came with the PNY GTX 780 XLR8. Usually we are not overly impressed with such recycling but this is one of the few exceptions. Basically the last generation blower cooler was designed around a 250 watt TDP processor. This means it had to be robust enough to handle a lot of heat and had to do so at moderate noise levels. When you pair that massive heatsink and large blower to a core that produces a third less heat well, that is the basis for not only much lower noise levels but also massive overclocking headroom! As an added bonus PNY has finally seen the light, so to speak, and has included a full length backplate. This backplate not only helps spread the load of the heatsink across a much greater surface area, but also helps protect the PCB from errant screwdriver mistakes. As an added bonus it certainly finishes off the overall look of the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 and really gives this card an 'enthusiast grade' vibe that all $500+ cards should give you. By removing the big and beefy heatsink and taking a good look at the PCB we can see that PNY has gone for a very decent, if not spectacular, multi-VRM power subsystem for both the GPU and the GDRR5 ram ICs. We doubt that this power delivery subsystem will be the weak link in this cards overclocking potential and rather it will simply come down to the luck of the draw on the GM204 core. Much like the PNY GTX 970, this XLR8'er has a very nice selection of connection options. In total there is one HDMI port, one DVI port, and three DisplayPort ports. While opting for a full size version did mean that the DVI port had to be relocated to the second slot, not having to deal with converter cables for any of these ports makes the small air restriction more than worthwhile. If all that was not enough as you can see the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 is not that much bigger a video card than the PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8. No matter what you think about the PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8 this additional bit of space is certainly worth the increased hassle factor in case selection! PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Testing Methodology Testing Methodology To fully test the abilities of a given video card, we have used a blend of in-game benchmarks and custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have used FRAPS to record the minimum and average frame rates and to do so for a set period of time. All tests were run a minimum of four times and the scores are the average of all four runs. All games were patched to their latest version. The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied. All games were tested at the two of the most popular resolutions of 1080P (1920x1080) and then again at 1440P (2560x1440). This means each game tested was run a minimum of 8 times: 4 @ 1080P and 4 @1440P. Before testing Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card. This was done to ensure that long term performance and not short term performance is being illustrated. The games used for testing were: Sleeping Dogs Metro: Last Light BioShock Infinite Crysis 3 Batman: Arkham Origins Tomb Raider Battliefield 4 Assassins Creed: Black Flag Call of Duty: Ghosts For stress testing we used Unigine’s Valley benchmark. For overclocking we used either the manufactures included software overclocking program or if necessary EVGA’s Precision X program. Drivers: GeForce 344.75 Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 4770K Memory: 16GB GSkill 2666 Trident X CL11 1.6v Motherboard: MSI MPower Max Z87 Cooling: Corsair H100i SSD: 1x Seagate 600 Pro 400GB, 2x Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs. Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks Synthetic Game Benchmarks In the Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of benchmark comparisons of PNY GeForce GTX 880 XLR8 and other comparable GPUs, using various benchmarks which come included with five popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance this card has to offer. To ensure that long term performance is and not short term performance is illustrated 15 minutes of Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run to ‘warm up’ the video card. Only then were any tests run on the now warm video card. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Sleeping Dogs Sleeping Dogs Gaming Benchmark Sleeping Dogs is an open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix, released on August 2012. Sleeping Dogs has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are the extreme display settings and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. World density is set to extreme, Vsync disabled, high-res textures are enabled, and shadow resolution, shadow filtering, screen space ambient occlusion, and quality motion blur are all set to high. As expected the GTX 980 XLR8 is simply a monster at 1920x1080 resolution. At this rather low resolution you can expect to see approximately a 30% improvement over a stock GTX 780 and over 7.5% improvement over a reference GTX 780Ti. Even more impressive is at 1440P this improvement only gets bigger and the distance between a stock 780 and this stock PNY 980 is over 34% - and a 780Ti is about 10% slower. Now that is massive performance boost for a single generation! PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Metro: Last Light Metro: Last Light Gaming Benchmark Metro: Last Light is a DX11 first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver released in May 2013. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play. Scene D6 was used and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are very high for quality and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. DirectX 11 is used, texture filtering is set to AF 16X, motion blur is normal, SSA turned on and tessellation is set to high. Metro Last Light produces results which are very similar to that of Sleeping Dogs. Specifically the PNY 980 is about 30% better at average frame rates than a 780. Also just like Sleeping Dogs the 1440P results are even better. More than anything the fact that a seemingly smaller and less powerful (1/3rd the TDP!) can do this just uderscores the amount of improvement and refinement NIVIDA has packed into this new Maxwell core. We just imagine what a 250 watt TDP version could do! PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - BioShock Infinite BioShock Infinite Gaming Benchmark BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, and published by 2K Games released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are UltraDX11 (option 3) for quality and a resolution of 1920x1800. BioShock Infinite did not see such massive gains and obviously this game favors sheer core count over speed of the cores. With that being said a boost of 13-19 percent over the previous GTX 780 is nothing to sneeze at either. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Tomb Raider Tomb Raider Gaming Benchmark Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game published by Square Enix and released in March 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are ultimate default settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. Tomb Raider has never been NVIDIA architecture friendly and yet this card does a very, very respectable job at crushing a stock 780. Unfortunately, at 1440P the difference between the brute force 780Ti and this elegant 980 is all but negligible. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Batman Arkham Origins Batman Arkham Origins Gaming Benchmark Batman: AO is an action-adventure video game published by Warner Bros and released in October 2013. The game has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. Anti-Aliasing is set to TXAA (high). Motion blur, Distortion, Lens Flare, Light Shafts, and Reflections set to On. Geometry, Dynamic Shadows, Depth of Field, and Ambient Occlusion all set to DX11 Enhanced. Batman Arkham Origins is another game which was not overly impressed by the 980. That is to say it barely scrapes by what a 780Ti can do. By the same token, it achives parity and even a touch better than that using a lot less power. If NVIDIA ever scales the Maxwell core up to a 250 watt versions we would be very, very surprised if the resulting '980Ti' would not out and out crush the best of the last generation. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Real World In-Game Explained Real World In-Game Benchmarks In the Real Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of timed real world game play results using FRAPS and four popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 OC2 has to offer and do so in a way which cannot be unduly skewed by driver ‘optimizations’ which have been included for the sole purpose of improving benchmark results. While not as common as it once was such optimizing is still not unheard of by either AMD or NVIDIA. Once again Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card prior to testing. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Battlefield 4 Battlefield 4 Gaming Benchmark Battlefield 4 is first person shooter video game, published by EA Digital Illusions CE and released in October 2013. Unlike most, this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming tests. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded the first 90 seconds of the single player Tashgar level. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are Ultra pre-set for quality, with VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. Battlefield 4 produced fairly typical results in that the PNY 980 XLR8 is simply in a different league from that of a GTX 780, but only moderately better than a 780Ti. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Assassins Creed: Black Flag Assassins Creed: Black Flag Gaming Benchmark Assassins Creed: BF is an historical action-adventure video game, published by published by Ubisoft and released in October 2013. Like Battlefield 4 this games does not include an in-game benchmark. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded a custom run through Havana’s marketplace. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. Environment quality was set to very high, Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X, Ambient Occlusion set to HBAO+ (high), Shadow Quality set to ‘soft shadow’, Motion Blur and Volumetric Blur both set to On. Texture Quality, Reflection Quality, and God Rays all set to High. The Assassins Creed 1440P results are as close to the actual overall average of any game tested. That is to say it is about 24.8% better than a stock GTX 780 and about 4.9% than GTX 780Ti. That is pretty darn good all things considered. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Call of Duty: Ghosts Call of Duty: Ghosts Gaming Benchmark Call of Duty: Ghosts is a first person shooter video game, published by Activision and released in October 2013. Since it does not include an in-game benchmark, it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Ghost Stories' level, starting as soon as we resume control of Logan back on Earth. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. Image Quality, Textures Resolution, Normal Map Resolution, and Specular Map Resolution set to Extra. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Antistrophic Filtering set to High, Terrain Detail set to ON, and Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X. With Shadows, Distortion, Motion Blue and Depth of Field set to Yes. Call Of Duty produced some of the worst results we saw. While the GTX 780 results are pretty average at 16-18%, the 780Ti results were 2-3 percent better than what a PNY GTX 980 can do. That is unfortunate, but with so fewer Cuda Cores and Texture Units to work with, there is going to be outliers. Thankfully it is in a game that has such a high frame per second count that we doubt anyone could tell the difference between a 980 and a 780Ti - though this is not exactly high praise for the new generation either! PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Crysis 3 Crysis 3 Gaming Benchmark Crysis 3 is a first person shooter video game, published by Electronic Arts and released in February 2013. While older than some of the others it is one of the most visually stunning games released to date and puts a lot of demands on the GPU. This makes it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Post Human' level, starting as soon as soon as prophet is handed a Hammer II pistol by Psycho. An average of four runs was taken. The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 1920x1080 & 1440P. Texture Quality, Game Effects, Objects, Particles, Post Processing, Shadows, Shading, Water, and System Specs all set to Very High. Motion Blurr was set to High and Lens Flare was set to On. Anti-Aliasing was set to MSAA 8X and Antistrophic Filtering was set to 16x. Crysis 3 was a lot more forgiving than Call Of Duty and shows that COD: Ghosts was indeed just an outlier. As with most of the other results, expect single digit improvements over a 780Ti and double digit improvements over a stock GTX 780. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Temperature, Noise, Power Temperature, Noise, and Power Analysis Video Card Temperature Results For all temperature testing the cards were used in an open test bed environment. Ambient temperature was kept at a constant 20°C (+/- 0.5°C) and if the ambient room temperatures rose above 21°C or dropped below 19°C at any time, all benchmarking was stopped until proper temperatures could normalized. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak temperature. For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes. This card is a damn cool running card for an enthusiast grade GPU! Of course some of its great cool running abilities come from the fact that its stock heatsink and fan are big and more than enough to keep a 165 watt TDP processor cool. This explains why the idle temperatures are so amazingly low. We can just image what they would have been if this video card used one PNY's stellar custom cooling solutions! Sound Level Test Results While everyone "hears" noise differently there is one easy way to remove all subjectivness and easily compare different fans: use a sound level meter. This way you can easily compare the various fans noise envelopes without us coloring the results and see what fans fit within your personal comfort level. Of course, we will endeavor to try and explain the various results - which are taken at a 15 inch distance from the GPU’s fan(s) - to help you gain an even better understanding of how loud a cooler's stock fan is, but even if you discount our personal opinions, the fact remains numbers don't lie. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak dB. For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes and recorded the peak dB. For an enthusiast grade video card these results are damn impressive. Unfortunately, the PNY GTX 980 XLR8 is still a blower based design and as such will not be as quiet as could possibly be. However, it is worth noting that these results are absolute worst case scenario results and in more realistic gaming scenarios this card was as quiet as a church mouse. All in all, this is one of the best blower style GPU cards we have seen, but it could have been even better if PNY had opted for one of their custom coolers. System Power Consumption To obtain accurate results we have connected the system to a Power Angle power meter that has in turn been attached to a 1500watt UPS. This ensures only 120volt power is supplied to the PSU and removes an variances that could potential crop up because of brownouts and power spikes. In order to stress the video card we have once again used Unigine’s Valley benchmark and ran it for 20 minutes to determine peak system power consumption. For idle results we have let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak idle power consumption. As expected this card is a power miser. Will it save enough power to make it a worthwhile upgrade from an 780Ti? No. Unless you are paying 50 cents a KW/hour you will never save enough to make it worth it -as you will upgrade to the next generation long before the breakeven point! PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Overclocking Overclocking To discover our PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB sample’s overclocking abilities we used EVGA’s Precision X software and began raising power and thermal thresholds to the maximum allowed and then increased the voltage also to the maximum permitted. Then using Unigine’s Valley benchmark we began stability testing. After the less than spectacular overclocking results we obtained with the PNY GTX 970 XLR8 we must admit to a certain amount of trepidation as we approached this phase of testing. Thankfully, the fault of the 970 is definitely not the Maxwell archteticure and instead was entirely the less than perfect cooling solution. When you take a rather cool running core and pair it to a relatively beefy cooler and the end result is a match that may not exactly be made in heaven but is still impressive nonetheless. At the end of the day we hit the physical limit of our particular Maxwell 980 gpu long before the cooling really became an issue. While yes the core does indeed get toasty fairly quickly, as long as you over-ride the default fan speed profile and let it run flat out, this reference 780'esque cooling solution is more than enough for this next generation. In the end we were able to hit a peak of 1488MHz on the GPU. This is 272Mhz improvement over the factory 'reference' boost speed and represents a 22.4 % overclock. On the memory side of the overclocking equation we were able to boost the GDDR5 RAM ICs from a stock 7Ghz to 7.8GHz. This is fairly average for high performance graphics memory ICs but still well over a 11% memory boost - and nothing the sneeze at. This combination of even faster GPU speed with faster memory speed translated in a very nice real world performance boost and was certainly worth the effort of dialing in the overclock. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Performance Summart and TL;DR Performance Summary and TL;DR In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the game results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB to similar products in all the games you will be able to easily find the game(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB is the worth the investment. The PNY GTX 980 XLR8 represents a long overdue paradigm shift in the video card industry. While for the past few years CPUs have been all about performance per watt and not just sheer performance. Thanks to NVIDIA and this new generation GPUS are finally also starting to take performance per watt seriously. While not a slam dunk success over a 780Ti, the PNY 980 XLR8 is the first of new breed of enthusiast grade video cards and the results are still very, very impressive. By the same token we do wish that this card came with a TDP of 200watts - still 25% less than 780Ti - as that extra power could have translated in to a much more decsive victory over the old guard. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Score Card and Summary Score Card and Summary Packaging & Accessories: 8 out of 10. The shipping container and accessories are classic PNY XLR8'er. That is to say above average bordering on great. The only thing we dislike about it is that it seems that no matter what price point PNY uses the same darn box and just takes a magic eraser and sub's in the proper model number! On the positive side the box does offer good protection to the card while in transit and finding room to store this box - in case you need to RMA this lifetime warrantied card - will be a snap. Functionality & Aesthetics: 17 out of 20 While it is odd to say it, the factory blower style cooler is more than enough to handle the new breed of Maxwell GPU and while the noise levels could have been even lower if PNY had opted for a custom design at the end of the day this design is powerful as it is pretty. That is to say very good. Build Quality & Warranty: 18 out of 20 When you fuse a standout warranty to a very robust physical design there really is not much to dislike about the PNY GTX 980 XCLR8 from either a build quality or warranty point of view. Performance: 28 out of 30 When you can meet and exceed the performance of a GeForce 780Ti and do so at only 2/3rds the power consumption there is very little reasons to complain about the performance of the 980 XLR8. By the same token a slightly higher TDP would have resulted in much better performance results and would have made it easier to justify to 780Ti owners. Value: 16 out of 20 Value is a nebulous term at the best of times and how big a value the PNY 980 XLR8 is to you depends on how big a premium you put on the upfront cost. If the idea of spending an extra $220 over the 970's high asking price is a non-starter, even if it nets you an extra 12-19% performance, than this card will not represent that good a value to you. On the other hand for only an extra XX you get a much better cooling solution, much higher performance and nearly as good power consumption. Final Score: 87 out of 100 The Pny GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 will not be right for every enthusiast and 780Ti owners will want to wait to see what the second wave of Maxwell cards bring to the table. For everyone else, the combination of "high speed, low drag" abilities of this prenominal card will change your preconceptions of what an enthusiast grade card has to look, act, and sound like. PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 4GB - Closing Statement Closing statement The GeForce GTX 980 "Maxwell" graphics processor unit is one of those pieces of technology that is rarely seen as it literally changes the market and the way consumers evaluate a video card. Up until the 980 release there was no ifs, no ands, and no buts about it, if you wanted the highest performance card you knew it was going to be hot running. You knew it was going to need a robust cooling solution that probably was even bigger and louder than its predecessors. Most importantly you knew it was going to hit the very limits of power consumption as it would come with a core that had a noticeably higher core count than its predecessor. The GeForce GTX 980, and by extension the 'reference' PNY XLR8 GeForce GTX 980 is not like its predecessors and does not follow the same outdated design philosophy. Instead it represents a paradigm shift for the industry and how consumers will look at high performance models. No longer will bigger CUDA core counts automatically mean better performance. Instead GPUs will be just like CPUs and a next gen may not impress people with its paper specifications but will impress in the real world. Put simply the main design goal of the GeForce GTX 980 series is to do more with less and the PNY XLR8 GeForce GTX 980 is the very epitome of this philosophy made whole. Thanks to greatly refined core architecture and memory handling this new video card with its XXhow manyXX fewer CUDA cores, and greatly reduced TDP, the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 easily outperforms a reference GeForce GTX 780. More importantly, while there were a few times when the extra efficiency of the 980 was equaled by the 780Ti's brute force approach, at the end of the day this card is faster than even that power house in the majority of scenarios. That is a major feat and just underscores the amount of engineering that NVIDIA has put into this new generation. While the performance of the PNY 980 XLR8 is impressive, it is actually the non-performance results which are sure to please. Thanks to the lower power requirement of the Maxwell architecture PNY was able to release a truely high performance video card that is not only a power miser but also rather quiet. Blower style coolers are typically not known for their low noise and cool running abilities, but this blower not only looks great, but sounds great too. No matter your priorities, that is a rather potent combination and sure to please most consumers. With all that being said, and there is a very good argument for the new direction NVIDIA is taking the market, this new generation of video cards offer very little incentive for 780Ti owners to upgrade to. Put simply, the performance increase this stock PNY 980 XLR8 offers is not significant enough to justify the upgrade expense, and neither does the energy savings make it worthwhile. Considering a most 780Ti's also came with custom cooling solutions which are even quieter, such an upgrade path is simply less than optimal. As such, we do have a hard time recommending the PNY GeForce GTX 980 XLR8 in its current form to owners of the previous generation's best performers. For these consumers we would take a wait and see approach. Instead wait for the 980Ti - or whatever they will call it -lands and then reevaluate the issue at that time. For everyone else, this reference 980 is sure to satisfy as it literally changes all the rules of the game. From now on you can indeed eat your cake and have it too,

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