Introduction

The GeForce GTX 980 is NVIDIA's latest high-end single-GPU graphics card, made possible by the company's new Maxwell architecture. The GM204 graphics processor that powers the GTX 980 in this review comes with amazing power consumption improvements that are the foundation behind the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 taking the enthusiast market by storm.

The GeForce GTX 980 is carved out of the 28 nm GM204 silicon with all its shaders enabled, resulting in a shader count of 2,048. There are 128 available texture units and the ROP count is a massive 64, with a 256-bit bus connecting 4 GB of GDDDR5 memory.



The ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Matrix is the company's new flagship card with tons of awesome features for hardcore overclockers, like a memory heater to avoid subzero cold bugs. With LN2 mode enabled, any limits on voltage and power are also gone, so you can easily unleash the card's full potential.

Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to 1241 MHz, though memory remained at the NVIDIA default of 1750 MHz. With a price of $660, the card is certainly not cheap as it is over $100 more expensive than cheaper GTX 980 variants.