The Card

The ASUS GTX 980 Matrix cooler looks fantastic with its bulky yet refined looks. Its slightly glossy and matte surfaces combine with the red highlights to make this one of the best-looking coolers I've seen. However, with its dimensions of 29.5 cm x 15.5 cm, it ends up being quite big.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card. With three DP outputs, you can build yourself a triple-monitor G-Sync-surround setup with only a single card!

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.


You may combine up to three GTX 980 cards in a multi-GPU SLI configuration. AMD recently switched to transferring CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus in order to handle 4K frames. NVIDIA's SLI suffers from no such limitations, so there is no reason for NVIDIA to use PCIe.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back).