ASUS STRIX GTX 980 OC 4 GB Review

Name: ASUS STRIX GTX 980 OC 4 GB
Brand: ASUS

W1zzard

on Oct 21st, 2014,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASUS

(75 Comments) »

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.

ASUS decided to use their recently introduced STRIX brand for their GTX 980 flagship. The card is built on a customized PCB design with an improved cooler that completely stops the fans in idle and features higher clock frequencies out of the box.

Currently retailing at $580, the card is relatively affordable, being just $30 more expensive than the reference board.

GeForce GTX 980 Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	GeForce GTX 970	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon HD 7990	GeForce GTX Titan	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 980	ASUS GTX 980 STRIX
Shader Units	1536	2304	2560	1664	2816	2x 2048	2688	2880	2048	2048
ROPs	32	48	64	64	64	2x 32	48	48	64	64
Graphics Processor	GK104	GK110	Hawaii	GM204	Hawaii	2x Tahiti	GK110	GK110	GM204	GM204
Transistors	3500M	7100M	6200M	5200M	6200M	2x 4310M	7100M	7100M	5200M	5200M
Memory Size	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	2x 3072 MB	6144 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	256 bit	512 bit	2x 384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1006 MHz+	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1051 MHz+	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	837 MHz+	876 MHz+	1126 MHz+	1178 MHz+
Memory Clock	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1750 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz
Price	$340	$320	$290	$330	$360	$1000	$1000	$430	$550	$580

Packaging

Package Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + documentation
PCIe power cable
Stickers to adjust color theme

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.