Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti was released this June. Built on the same GM200 GPU as the GeForce Titan X, it has 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 the Titan X, which means custom designs could surpass Titan X performance at a much lower price point.



Today, we are reviewing Gigabyte's new GT 980 Ti Extreme WaterForce, which, as the name suggests, comes with a preinstalled, prefilled, maintenance-free watercooling solution. The card comes with a high overclock out of the box as its GPU runs a base clock of 1216 MHz and the memory is clocked at 1800 MHz.

With a retail price of $720, it is more affordable than competing products, like the MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning.