# MSI GeForce GTX 980 Gaming 4 GB



## W1zzard (Sep 24, 2014)

MSI's latest flagship is the GTX 980 Gaming. It delivers a super quiet gaming experience thanks to a powerful thermal solution and a well-crafted fan profile. In idle and light gaming, the fans will even stop completely. MSI has also overclocked their card out of the box, which yields around 10% extra performance.

*Show full review*


----------



## FourtyTwo (Oct 13, 2014)

Page 3. "Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one *mini-*HDMI port, and three *mini-*DisplayPorts."
Mini doesn't seem correct.


----------



## W1zzard (Oct 13, 2014)

FourtyTwo said:


> Page 3. "Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one *mini-*HDMI port, and three *mini-*DisplayPorts."
> Mini doesn't seem correct.


fixed, thanks


----------



## nickbaldwin86 (Oct 13, 2014)

how come you don't put GTX 690 in the mix?

I was thinking of getting one because I have a ITX and can only run one card... but look at other reviews i think the 980 is within 1-5FPS and the 980 is a single GPU so no worrying about SLI issues.

Thanks.
Nick


----------



## the54thvoid (Oct 13, 2014)

Must resist the urge.........


----------



## WhiteLotus (Oct 13, 2014)

You say the card is 14.5cm tall... do you mean wide? I get the card is long, and I get that the card is a multi slot card. But I don't understand how it can be 14.5 cm tall (implying height)... you must mean wide... right?


----------



## W1zzard (Oct 13, 2014)

WhiteLotus said:


> You say the card is 14.5cm tall... do you mean wide? I get the card is long, and I get that the card is a multi slot card. But I don't understand how it can be 14.5 cm tall (implying height)... you must mean wide... right?


my "tall" is your "wide", your "tall" is my "thick". for the longest side i use "long"



nickbaldwin86 said:


> how come you don't put GTX 690 in the mix?


gtx 690 is included in the summaries, i honestly simply forgot to include it in the individual graphs. hmm in the 980 ref review too .. ah you can look at 970 sli. sorry about that


----------



## GhostRyder (Oct 13, 2014)

That is a fantastic card, man MSI even without doing a lightning variant really hit the ground running with the gaming variants.  I mean I do not know how many would be like that but a 2050mhz clock on the memory is just fantastic!!!

You know, these cards are honestly tempting especially when factoring in overclockability on just air!  I would really die to to see what a classified or lightning variant is going to be capable of (But at least for the lightning ill be waiting)!


----------



## Darksword (Oct 13, 2014)

W1zzard said:


> my "tall" is your "wide", your "tall" is my "thick". for the longest side i use "long"




Ditto.  I say it the same way.

10.5 inches long
14.5cm tall
2 PCIE slots wide


----------



## nickbaldwin86 (Oct 13, 2014)

W1zzard said:


> gtx 690 is included in the summaries, i honestly simply forgot to include it in the individual graphs. hmm in the 980 ref review too .. ah you can look at 970 sli. sorry about that



THANKS for steering me in the right direction!!!  I think I will stick with the idea of getting the 980 or wait for the 990


----------



## dj-electric (Oct 13, 2014)

MSI NAILED IT. What a beautiful GTX 980, well done!


----------



## ...PACMAN... (Oct 14, 2014)

I'd love to see a SLI review with these cards, interested what temps you would be looking at and how much it would affect fan noise. Nice review W1ZZ, MSI have been hitting it out of the park now for quite a while with their GFX cards.


----------



## natr0n (Oct 14, 2014)

I'm guessing 9.9 cause contractually obligated to Asus.


----------



## bubbleawsome (Oct 14, 2014)

Holy heck that overall performance. Except uberresolutions its a top card. Beats the 7990 even along with the 690. Beats the 295x2 on low resolutions.  I want two in SLI so bad, I've got no income though. Maybe send me the review samples.


----------



## Nordic (Oct 14, 2014)

This card has some amazing low noise. That is quite a bump in power usage I would say though although, still lower than my old 7970.


----------



## LeonVolcove (Oct 14, 2014)

wait this card is 256-bit?


----------



## Tonduluboy (Oct 14, 2014)

since Nvidia reduced  the price of their GTX newer model, Wizzard has been giving them 9.9 rating... Seems that the price really affect the rating...
What will be the rating if this card selling at $700 with same features?

PS: in my country this card selling at least $667 before shipping cost...


----------



## YautjaLord (Oct 14, 2014)

Wiz, i know i said in one of the 980 reviews that there's C:R (Carmageddon: Reincarnation) Early Access Pre-Alpha out there. Let me tell you: if dialed to High on everything AA excluded, this game runs & looks awesome even on single GTX 760; now i also dialed it all the way to UltraHigh - here's were this 980 will shine, cause 760 barely keeps up with the consistent frame rate, i.e. the game lags the f*ck out of 760. lol Dig the Yebis 2 3rd party tech Stainless Games licensed, it really is taxing for lighting engine alone i tell you, the 4GB of vRAM will definitely shine there. Virtual Textures Quality switch will also make it in one of future updates, UltraHigh is reserved for 3GB+ of vRAM at this point.

P.S. TechSpot also have Alien: Isolation benched on variety of GPUs - from GTX 400/HD 7000 series, all the way to GTX 900/R9 200 series; seeing Wolfenstein: The New Order is not in Steam for my country, i thinking of going for Alien: Isolation - wanna see how it plays on GTX 700/900 series before purchasing it.


----------



## Nomis22 (Oct 14, 2014)

Hello and first of all, thank you very much for the review.

I must say I'm a bit disappointed by this card after all, even though it reaches all the goals I hoped it would...

Let me explain: what I care about for my future setup prospection are Relative performance in 2560*1600 and Fan noise. On these matters, the MSI 980 Gaming is about 2% faster than the MSI 780 Ti Gaming and offers the same under load noise level, 30 dBa.

I know the 780 Ti is quickly disappearing from the market and its price point only went down because of the 980s release, but still, right now: on the two criteria I gave, both cards are performing very much the same, and the 780 Ti can be found at 480 € whereas is 980 is at 600 € (pardon my french )!

So really, the only difference I can see is the temperature under load: MSI 780 Ti is at 78° vs. 66° for the MSI 980. I would be curious to know the performance you'd get pushing the 980 to 78° without touching max fan speed (to stick at the same noise level)  Is that even possible, you think?


----------



## The Quim Reaper (Oct 14, 2014)

Pretty shocking that a card costing this much money doesn't come with a backplate.

Given that many of these cards will go in pretty high end cases with nice windows, including my own, I wouldn't want a GPU without a backplate TBH.


----------



## W1zzard (Oct 14, 2014)

YautjaLord said:


> C:R (Carmageddon: Reincarnation) Early Access Pre-Alpha


No plans to include unreleased software.

I have new games for the next rebench: Dead Rising 3, Alien Isolation, Shadow of Mordor, Ryse.

And probably more will be released soon, thinking Civilization, Far Cry 4, unlikely: Evil Within


----------



## birdie (Oct 14, 2014)

Ryse: Son of Rome and Far Cry 4 must absolutely be benchmarked - they are the pinnacle of PC graphics nowadays (Witcher 3 and  Assassin's Creed Unity haven't yet been released).

Alien Isolation is worthless - no open spaces to speak of. Benchmarking dark corridors sounds way to stupid.


----------



## Casecutter (Oct 14, 2014)

The Quim Reaper said:


> Pretty shocking that a card costing this much money doesn't come with a backplate.


More troubling just a 2 year warranty (3 year on parts that's just dumb) for a Premium offering. 

It's time for AIB's (both AMD/Nvidia) to get back to offering some longer warranties on cards of this class.  When a cards MSRP's over $300 when released, a 3 year (P&L) should be minimum.  We need to see AIB cards like this getting a "CON" for just 2 year.   

The mantra should be... "more than $300 must deliver 3 year!"


----------



## YautjaLord (Oct 14, 2014)

W1zzard said:


> No plans to include unreleased software.
> 
> I have new games for the next rebench: Dead Rising 3, Alien Isolation, Shadow of Mordor, Ryse.
> 
> And probably more will be released soon, thinking Civilization, Far Cry 4, unlikely: Evil Within



It (C:R) will be released in 2015, hopefully Q1. No problem, i'll test it for now as it is (Pre-Alpha) Wiz.  Far Cry 4 - would love to see it benched on 2 GTX 760s in SLI. Evil Within uses id's heavily modified idTech5 or idTech6 if i'm correct. DOOM4 (called just DOOM) uses idTech6 according to some article i read a while back.



Spoiler



Buying C:R as it is in it's Early Access Pre-Alpha form nets you not only that but also Carmageddon Max Pack (vanilla C1 & it's expansion/add-on Splat Pack) & Carmageddon 2, according to Stainless Games co-founder Neil "Nobby" Barnden plus DRM-free LAN only version of C:R. Just saying Wiz.


----------



## Lionheart (Oct 14, 2014)

Looks like the best GTX 980 

Just wanted to ask Wiz if you could either add BF4 to the Overclocking results page seeing as a lot more ppl play it compared to BF3 and it's more demanding as well


----------



## ChaoticG8R (Oct 15, 2014)

Lack of a back plate again is bothersome for me here.  It's not like it's a foreign concept for MSI, they are just willingly choosing to forgo it.


----------



## 荷兰大母猪 (Oct 15, 2014)

I am really expecting msi gtx 980 lightning.


----------



## 7950 Flex (Oct 15, 2014)

I've had the MSI 780 ti gaming for a while now and received a second one yesterday for SLI. According to the benchmarks the FPS difference is marginal at best and the fan noise is identical at load. With just the one 780 ti working, it tops out at 70-72 degrees under full load in my rig but now that I've added a second one the top card reaches a max of 80 degrees and the fan spins at 80-86% to keep it at 80 degrees. It gets pretty loud but the sound from my speakers drowns it out. Also, the bottom card tops out at around 65 degrees.

I'm curious to know how two of these MSI 980 would fair as far as the temps/fan speed go of the top card in my rig.

The new features seem interesting enough.

I agree about the backplate also, I like backplates =/

Are there any I can buy for my MSI 780 ti gaming cards?

And Wiz it would be great if you benched those games. Ryse is gorgeous and pretty taxing I guess, not as taxing as Crysis 3 I think. Dead Rising is nice too and the sheer number of zombies on the screen at the same time cause dips in fps but still very playable. I really wanted to see how it would work with two of these 780 ti in SLI but of course it just crashed lol. I wonder if all those zombies are putting pressure on the CPU or the GPU. Shadow of Mordor looks nice and runs very well on one card on 1440p and Alien Isolation is pretty light. Can't wait to see your benchmarks


----------



## till69 (Oct 15, 2014)

Here with my MSI 980 first fan starts at 50°C and stops when temp falls below 40°
Seconds fan starts at about 60°

Asus Strix should be better choice... fan starts at 65° and stops at 53°


----------



## Boeing707 (Oct 16, 2014)

I don't think this card deserves a 9.9 score. It does not even have a backplate, and the overclock out of the box is not large compared to other 980 cards.
At least the cooler has 5 heatpipes...


----------



## bubbleawsome (Oct 16, 2014)

荷兰大母猪 said:


> I am really expecting msi gtx 980 lightning.


I doubt it. They said they were holding off for Big Maxwell.


----------



## jihadjoe (Oct 20, 2014)

1380/1481 base/boost is amazing. Any idea what the actual in-game clocks were with Kepler/Maxwell boost active?


----------



## KarymidoN (Dec 4, 2014)

natr0n said:


> I'm guessing 9.9 cause contractually obligated to Asus.



The reason for the GTX 980 from Asus STRIX have received a score of 10 is for its energy efficiency, the DIGI + VRM Chip is a differential, my motherboard has one of these and it really weighs on choice. look on page 23 of graphs, compare, The Asus engineers managed to get the board to be more economical without losing performance and even opening a massive overclocking potential.


----------



## Tibor Hazafi (Jun 30, 2015)

Are these FPS numbers in techpowerup game benchmarks generally minimum or average values?


----------

