Introduction

The GeForce GTX 980 is NVIDIA's latest high-end single-GPU graphics card, made possible by the company's new Maxwell architecture. The GM204 graphics processor, which powers the GTX 980 in this review, comes with amazing power consumption improvements that are the foundation behind the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 taking the enthusiast market by storm.

The GeForce GTX 980 is carved out of the 28 nm GM204 silicon with all its shaders enabled, resulting in a shader count of 2,048. There are 128 available texture units and the ROP count is a massive 64, with a 256-bit bus connecting 4 GB of GDDDR5 memory.



ASUS decided to use their recently introduced STRIX brand for their GTX 980 flagship. The card is built on a customized PCB design with an improved cooler that completely stops the fans in idle and features higher clock frequencies out of the box.

Currently retailing at $580, the card is relatively affordable, being just $30 more expensive than the reference board.