Finally! The Palit GTX 980 Ti SuperJetstream is the first GTX 980 Ti that can follow in the footsteps of the quiet GTX 780 Ti / GTX 980 cards we've seen in the past. The card comes with a base clock of 1152 MHz, which is a decent overclock, but definitely smaller than what we've seen on other cards. Compared to the GTX 980 Ti reference, we see an impressive 13% performance improvement at 4K, which makes it 9% faster than the Titan X and 14% faster than AMD's Radeon Fury X. I wish Palit had overclocked their memory too, which could have provided an additional performance increase.

Palit is one of the few GTX 980 Ti manufacturers to use a triple-slot cooling solution. In the past, I've criticized Palit's triple-slot coolers when they solely focused on low temperatures, which provides no noteworthy benefit over a more balanced approach that also lowers noise levels. This isn't the case with the GTX 980 Ti SuperJetstream. Fan settings seem carefully fine-tuned to the capabilities of the cooler, which results in fantastic gaming noise levels of only 31 dBA—nearly whisper quiet. At these noise levels, the card is quieter than the water-cooled Radeon R9 Fury X. Palit has also included the fans-off-in-idle feature that lets you work, watch movies, or play light games without any fan noise at all. In the past, some Palit graphics cards had issues with coil whine, but my sample exhibited no coil noise at typical frame-rates; just like on most other GTX 980 Ti cards, you can hear a little bit of coil noise at very high frame rates beyond 200 FPS. Another thing we criticized on the GTX 980 Ti reference design was the lack of a backplate. Palit addressed the issue by including a metal backplate that also contributes to VRM cooling on their card.
The triple-slot cooler is obviously not for everyone. If you are looking to build an SLI rig, I'd recommend using a dual-slot card for at least the upper-most slot to give it better access to fresh air. You might also be out of luck with a small case.

NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture comes with fantastic power efficiency improvements, and the Palit GTX 980 Ti Super Jetstream is no exception. While it does use a bit more power than the reference design, the increase is slim, smaller than on most other GTX 980 Ti cards we've tested. With the performance improvements from the overclock taken into account, the card actually delivers better performance-per-watt than the reference design. Furmark maximum power is slightly lower as with the reference design, though, so Palit did not increase the board's power limit, which would have helped unlock additional Boost Clock potential.

My biggest issue with this fantastic card is that it's not available in the US since Palit left that market a while ago. In Europe, the card retails for around €700 (including VAT), which is cheaper than any of the competing custom-design GTX 980 Tis from EVGA, MSI, ASUS, or Gigabyte. So not only is the card awesome, it's also one of the most affordable GTX 980 Tis; that is, if you can use the word "affordable" when talking about $650 graphics cards. I can't think of any reason to buy the reference design or Titan X as both run slower, hotter, and louder. Thanks to the overclock out of the box, Palit's gaming price/performance ratio is better than with the GTX 980 Ti reference or GTX 980. AMD's R9 Fury X at $650 lags behind in every metric, which now includes noise as well. We've tested voltage tuning on the Fury X yesterday and were disappointed. So if you are looking for a high-end card this summer, the GTX 980 Ti is the way to go. Which manufacturer's custom design you end up buying doesn't matter because the differences are, rather, nuances you can pick between based on personal taste. I installed the Palit GTX 980 Ti Super JetStream into my own system half an hour ago.