Saturday 17 October 2015

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+

EVGA has ten GTX 980 Ti cards in its roster, and the Classified sits at the top, at least until the K|NGP|N edition is released. With a price of £620 inc VAT, however, it needs to prove itself.


It’s based on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU, which sports 2,816 cores, 176 texture units and 96 ROPs, and it’s paired with 6GB of GDDR5 via a 384-bit memory bus, which equips it with enough horsepower for 4K gaming. However, EVGA has overclocked the core by a massive 19 per cent, taking it to a base cock of 1190MHz (1291MHz boost), with actual speeds of over 1400MHz observed in games. It’s one of the highest factory overclocks around for this GPU, but the memory has been left at 7GHz (effective). We’ve had great success overclocking the memory used with the GTX 900 series, so this is a little disappointing.

The Classified sports the standard set of display outputs, and it’s also fitted with dual SLI fingers, with 4-way setups supported. It maintains a dual-slot form factor and its length measures just under 280mm, making it an easy fit in most cases. That said, the cooler does extend past the expansion slot bracket edge by almost 30mm, which could affect some small form factor chassis.

Meanwhile, EVGA’s ACX 2.0+ cooler is very well built and uses six heatpipes and a GPU contact plate, all of which are nickel plated. A cooling plate also ensures all the memory chips and VRMs are directly cooled by the two fans, which each feature optimised swept fan blades, double ball bearings and an extreme low power motor. EVGA claims this combination improves airflow while reducing noise, but also decreases fanpower consumption, leaving more power available for the core components when overclocking. The fans are semi-passive too, switching off completely when the GPU temperature is below 60~65°C. Lastly, while there’s plenty of ventilation in the rear I/O panel, the cooler shroud is open at the sides, so bear in mind that lots of heat will end up in your chassis.

The card is also supported against its own weight by a brushed metal backplate, which has the added benefit of looking rather swish through a case window, and it will help a little with heat dissipation too.

Power is drawn through a pair of 8-pin PCI-E connections (an upgrade from the reference 8-pin/6-pin combo) and two dual 6-pin to single 8-pin adaptors are provided as well, each neatly braided in black.

Power delivery, meanwhile, is handled by a massive 14+3 power phase setup – the main reason for the extended PCB height. In theory, this setup will help to deliver higher levels of clean power to both the core and memory than the standard 6+2 design, which can be useful when overclocking.

Other features include support for EVBot, EVGA’s dedicated hardware controller for overclocking on the fly, via a dedicated connection next to the power inputs. You’ll also find a BIOS switch here – the card has one marked normal and another marked for liquid nitrogen cooling. Lastly, you get easily accessible voltage monitoring points next to the BIOS switch (although no cables to connect to them) and a non-conductive thermal strip to place over the VRMs and prevent shorting when using aftermarket cooling – EVGA has clearly kept extreme overclockers in mind when designing the Classified.

Performance


Average frame rates tell us that this card is approximately 14 per cent quicker than a stock GTX 980 Ti. Compared with AMD’s flagship, the R9 Fury X, it’s 23 per cent quicker at 2,560 x 1,440 and ‘only’ 19 per cent ahead at 4K.

The all-important minimum frame rates tell us that this card makes light work of 2,560 x 1,440, staying above 60fps in every test – an achievement that neither the Fury X nor a stock-speed GTX 980 Ti can match. Even at 4K, frame rates are consistently smooth - the lowest result is 31fps in Crysis 3. The 30-60fps margin is where G-Sync really shows its capabilities, so this card would be great with 4K G-Sync screen. In short, the GTX 980 Ti Classified effectively represents the pinnacle of current single GPU performance.

Power consumption is higher than a GTX 980 Ti by around 50W under load, but the total system peak draw is still comfortably below 430W. The ACX 2.0+ cooler does an admirable job too. It kept the GPU at a delta T of under 60°C in a well-ventilated chassis, with the fans peaking at around 1,400rpm, which proved to be only just audible. There was also zero coil whine; indicative of high-quality components.

We used EVGA Precision X to max out the power and thermal limits and increased the GPU voltage by 50mV too. We managed to add 75MHz for a 1265MHz base clock (1366MHz boost). In reality, though, the card was staying at over 1.5GHz under load – a truly outstanding result for this GPU. The memory reached a staggering 8.4GHz (effective) as well.

These impressive overclocks yielded performance increases of between 7 and 13 per cent, with a trade-off of slightly elevated power consumption, temperature and noise, although nothing alarming in any case.

Conclusion


Pairing a GTX 980 Ti with a 19 per cent overclock results in performance that’s simply through the roof, and the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified ACX 2.0+ even has a fair bit of overclocking headroom left in the bank. All the bells and whistles are there too; even those who like to dabble with liquid nitrogen are covered. Yes, the price tag is around £100 more than a standard GTX 980 Ti, but if you truly want to play games smoothly at 4K with a single GPU, this sort of investment is needed. MATTHEW LAMBERT

VERDICT
An outstanding and very desirable graphics card that’s capable of smooth, high-detail 4K gaming on a single card.

SPECIFICATIONS
Graphics processor Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, 1190MHz (boost 1291MHz)
Pipeline 2,816 stream processors, 96 ROPs
Memory 6GB GDDR5, 7GHz effective
Bandwidth 336GB/sec
Compatibility DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5
Outputs/inputs 3 x DisplayPort, Dual-link DVI-I, HDMI
Power connections 2 x 8-pin, top-mounted
Size 279mm long, dual-slot