The Card

Gigabyte's cooler comes in a near-black color, which does look at bit plasticky, though such depends on the viewing angle. I find it important to mention that the card does not exceed a normal slot's height like many other custom GTX 980 cards. You will find a nice sturdy backplate with a somewhat three-dimensional pattern that looks great on the back. Dimensions of the card are 29.5 cm x 11.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts, a unique output configuration Gigabyte calls "FlexDisplay". Using an automatic TMDS switch chip on the board, you may run 2x DVI, 1x DP and 1x HDMI or 3x DP, 1x DVI and 1x HDMI at the same time. This setup provides additional flexibility while allowing for a triple-monitor-surround gaming setup with 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).