The Card

You may customize the ASUS STRIX cooler with its included stickers, provided in gold and red. I actually like the clean sticker-free cooler a lot as well, so you have three possible design choices to pick from. A nice backplate also protects the card against damage during handling. Dimensions of the card are 29.0 cm x 14.5 cm.


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 four 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).