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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti 6GB Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

Price

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti will be launched with an MSRP of £549 in the UK and $649 in the US. This review will be updated once e-tailers start listing the card for sale.

Overview

Today’s review has been a very peculiar one, on the one hand, we see the release of the first ‘Ti’ branded Maxwell graphics card; on the other, we see it pretty much dethrone the Titan X. To get an accurate test, I had to test the Titan X (and the rest of the Maxwell line up) on the beta drivers ready for the GTX 980Ti as the 980Ti would not work on the previous drivers effectively. This presented an issue to the Titan X; it was no longer the ‘Top’ graphics card, with the GTX 980Ti knocking it off the top spot in a few tests.

This card is simply awesome; I have no idea what the NVIDIA boffins were thinking when they decided to create this graphics card, but whatever it was; they need to do it more. It has proven the most powerful single GPU graphics card that we’ve ever tested in a few of our tests and the price is something to make the AMD R9 295×2 shake in it’s boots. The fact that this card only (ha!) has 6GB VRAM makes it seem inferior to the Titan X, but that is simply not the case.

The overclocking on this was amazing, hitting around 29% overclocked boost speed; this gave an average performance increase of 9%. When directly compared to the Titan X, they are roughly on par; the Titan X starts pulling away at 4K and will cope better with higher resolutions.

Like with all of the NVIDIA high-end graphics cards, except the GTX 980, of late, there is a distinct lack of BACKPLATES. I understand NVIDIA not including it to improve thermal performance when in SLI, but I think the consumer should have the option; like a bundled feature in the box that the owner can choose to put on or not.

Pros