Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti was released just a few weeks ago. It is built on the same GM200 GPU as the GeForce Titan X, but with fewer shaders (2816 vs 3072). While the GTX 980 Ti's GPU is still produced on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC in Taiwan, it comes with the fantastic power efficiency optimizations of the NVIDIA Maxwell architecture, which promises lower power draw, higher performance, and reduced fan noise, all at the same time.

Our review of the reference design GTX 980 Ti revealed that it is barely slower than Titan X, which means custom designs could be able to surpass Titan X performance at a much lower price point.



The first custom GTX 980 Ti design we are reviewing is the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming. It uses a custom PCB design and comes with Gigabyte's Windforce 3X cooling solution, which should definitely be a step up from the reference design cooler. Clock speeds have been increased to 1152 MHz base and memory clock remains at 1753 MHz. With a price of $690, it is certainly not cheap and looks to be one of the more expensive GTX 980 Ti variants.