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 MSI's new flagship GeForce GTX 980 Ti using the "Lightning" branding, which stands for maximum overclockability and the support for features extreme overclockers using liquid nitrogen will find useful.

For more "regular" users, MSI has built a large triple-slot, triple-fan thermal solution that turns its fans off in idle and light gaming. At a base clock of 1203 MHz, the GTX 980 Ti Lightning comes highly overlclocked out of the box, and memory has been overclocked as well.

All these features come at a quite significant price premium as the MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning is currently available online for $779, which is more than $150 over the cheapest GTX 980 Ti.