Today, we are reviewing our first GTX 980 Ti since AMD launched their Fury X, which means the picture in the enthusiast segment is finally complete.
MSI's GeForce GTX 980 Ti introduces a new TwinFrozr V cooler variant to the company's GeForce lineup and is heavily overclocked to a base clock of 1178 MHz out of the box; the memory is also overclocked by 25 MHz. With the card's large boost range, it turns out to be the fastest GTX 980 Ti we have tested so far. Compared to the GTX 980 Ti reference board, the performance increase is an impressive 15% at 4K, which makes the card 10% faster than the GTX Titan X and 15% faster than AMD's watercooled Fury X. There is one oddity I wanted to mention, though. Back when we reviewed the MSI GTX 980 Non-Ti Gaming, MSI sent us a card with a base clock of 1216 MHz, a value that was never seen in the wild. Retail cards came with 1190 MHz instead—just look at our VGA BIOS database here. The bottom-most BIOS is that of my review card and the others are retail. On retail cards, you had to use Afterburner to load that overclocking profile manually, and I suspect the same to be the case with this card—our review sample runs 1178 MHz base and retail cards run 1140 MHz base, keep that in mind when comparing cards for purchase.
The new version of MSI's TwinFrozr cooler does a great job at keeping the card cool since the board never even gets close to the 84°C temperature limit at which NVIDIA Boost will start lowering clocks to keep temperatures in check. MSI also includes the fans-off-in-idle feature that lets you work, watch movies, or play light games without any fan noise at all. Fan noise during serious gaming is also much lower than with the NVIDIA reference design, but at 37 dBA, far from whisper quiet. The EVGA GTX 980 Ti is definitely quieter than that and the ASUS GTX 980 Ti Strix may even get closer to the 30 dBA mark. Another thing we criticized on the reference design was the lack of a backplate. MSI addressed the issue by including a great-looking metal backplate on their card.
NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture comes with fantastic power efficiency improvements and the MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming is no exception. However, although still nothing to worry about, the power consumption increase is a bit larger than I expected. Furmark maximum power is the same as with the reference design, though, so MSI did not increase the board's power limit, which would have made sense given they changed the board power input to dual-8-pin.
The GeForce GTX 980 Ti doesn't come cheap at a price of $650 for the reference design, and MSI is asking another $30 for their Gaming card, which is reasonable. Still, even at $680, the card's gaming price/performance ratio is better than that of the GTX 980 Ti reference at $650 or the GTX 980 at $480. AMD's Fury X at $650 lags behind in every metric except noise because it is watercooled, though the pump emits a high-pitched whine. So if you are looking for a high-end card this summer, the GTX 980 Ti is the way to go, and the price increase of a custom variant is definitely worth it. Which manufacturer's custom design you end up buying doesn't make that much of a difference because the differences are, rather, nuances you can pick between based on personal taste.