NVIDIA GeForce GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell Video Card Review
Test System
Before we look at the numbers, let’s take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done using a fresh install of Windows 8 Pro 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. It should be noted that we average all of our test runs. There has been some concern of people testing a cold card versus a hot card, but we’ve always done out testing ‘hot’ since the site started back more than a decade ago.
Video Cards & Drivers used for testing:
- NVIDIA GeForce 344.07 For All Maxwell/Fermi Cards and 335.23 for the Kepler Cards
- AMD CATALYST 14.5
Intel X79/LGA2011 Platform
The Intel X79 platform that we used to test the all of the video cards was running the ASUS P9X79-E WS motherboard with BIOS 1501 that came out on 01/15/2014. We went with the Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E processor to power this platform as it is PCIe 3.0 certified, so all graphics cards are tested with PCI Express Gen 3 enabled. The Kingston HyperX 10th Anniversary 16GB 2400MHz quad channel memory kit was set to XMP Profile #2. This profile defaults to 2133MHz with 1.65v and 11-12-12-30 1T memory timings. The OCZ Vertex 460 240GB SSD was run with latest firmware available. A Corsair AX860i digital power supply provides clean power to the system and is also silent as the fan hardly ever spins up. This is critical to our testing as it lowers the ambient noise level of the room and gives us more accurate sound measurements than the old Corsair AX1200 power supply that we used from 2012 till this year that had a loud fan that always ran.
Here are the exact hardware components that we are using on our test system:
| The Intel X79 Test Platform | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Component |
Brand/Model |
Live Pricing |
|||
| Processor | Intel Core i7-4960X | ||||
| Motherboard |
ASUS P9X79-E WS
|
||||
| Memory |
16GB Kingston 2133MHz
|
||||
| Video Card | Various | ||||
| Solid-State Drive | OCZ Vertex 460 240GB | ||||
| Cooling | Intel TS13X (Asetek) | ||||
| Power Supply | Corsair AX860i | ||||
| Operating System | Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit | ||||
| Monitor | Sharp PN-K321 32″ 4K | ||||
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4GB Reference Video Card GPU-Z Info:
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 4GB WindForce 3x Video Card GPU-Z Info:
EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card GPU-Z Info:
ZOTAC AMP! OMEGA Edition GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card GPU-Z Info:
