Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti was released in June last year. Built on the same GM200 GPU as the GeForce Titan X, it has fewer shaders (2816 vs 3072). While the GTX 980 Ti's GPU is still produced on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC in Taiwan, it comes with the fantastic power efficiency optimizations of the NVIDIA Maxwell architecture, which promises lower power draw, higher performance, and reduced fan noise all at the same time.

Our review of the reference design GTX 980 Ti revealed that it is barely slower than the Titan X, which means custom designs could surpass Titan X performance at a much lower price point.



Today, we are reviewing the Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming, which is Gigabyte's most recent variant of the GTX 980 Ti it released just a few weeks ago. The card is part of Gigabyte's new Xtreme Gaming lineup set to cater to the needs of gamers and overclockers alike. Gigabyte installed a large triple-fan, triple-slot heatsink to ensure the card stays cool at all times. In terms of PCB design, the card is identical to the Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti WaterForce, just with an air cooler instead. Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to a base clock of 1216 MHz, and memory has also been overclocked to 1801 MHz. With a price of $690, the card is remarkably cheaper than the ASUS GTX 980 Ti Matrix or MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning.