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 which 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.



Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming is the company's current flagship card. It comes overclocked out of the box with the GPU running at 1228 MHz and the memory clocking in at 1750 MHz, NVIDIA's default speed.

One unique feature is the addition of a second DVI port, while retaining three possible DP outputs at the same time. The card uses a large triple-fan cooler to cope with its heat output.

Currently retailing at $629, the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming is not cheap. Let's see if it's worth the price.