The Card
GeForce GTX 980 sticks with the beautiful cooler design NVIDIA pioneered many years ago with the GeForce GTX 690. There is actually a backplate on the other side, with a nicely textured surface featuring a GeForce logo. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 cm x 11.5 cm.
Installation requires two slots in your system.
Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card. G-Sync (which requires DP) is now also supported for up to three displays at the same time.
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 four 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 has no such limitations, so there is no reason to use PCIe.
Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (
front,
back).