MSI GeForce GTX 980 Gaming 4 GB Review

Name: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Gaming 4 GB
Brand: MSI

W1zzard

on Oct 13th, 2014,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

(33 Comments) »

Introduction

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.

MSI's GTX 980 Gaming is a full custom variant of the GTX 980 with a new dual-fan MSI TwinFrozr cooler and a custom board design with new voltage regulation circuitry. The card is also overclocked to a base clock of 1216 MHz out of the box.

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

GeForce GTX 980 Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	GeForce GTX 970	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon HD 7990	GeForce GTX Titan	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 980	MSI GTX 980 Gaming
Shader Units	1536	2304	2560	1664	2816	2x 2048	2688	2880	2048	2048
ROPs	32	48	64	64	64	2x 32	48	48	64	64
Graphics Processor	GK104	GK110	Hawaii	GM204	Hawaii	2x Tahiti	GK110	GK110	GM204	GM204
Transistors	3500M	7100M	6200M	5200M	6200M	2x 4310M	7100M	7100M	5200M	5200M
Memory Size	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	2x 3072 MB	6144 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	256 bit	512 bit	2x 384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1006 MHz+	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1051 MHz+	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	837 MHz+	876 MHz+	1126 MHz+	1216 MHz+
Memory Clock	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1750 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz	1750 MHz
Price	$340	$320	$290	$330	$360	$1000	$1000	$430	$550	$580

Packaging

Package Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD (not pictured) + Documentation
PCIe power cable
DVI adapter

The Card

MSI has refreshed their TwinFrozr cooler design to be more colorful, using red highlights. I like the change because it makes the card look more stylish. Dimensions of the card are 28.0 cm x 14.5 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one mini-HDMI port, and three mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor-surround gaming is possible with one card. With three DP outputs, you can build yourself a triple-monitor G-Sync-surround setup with only a single card!

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 2.0 compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.

You may combine up to four GTX 980 cards in a multi-GPU SLI configuration. AMD recently switched to transferring CrossFire data via the PCI-Express bus in order to handle 4K frames. NVIDIA's SLI suffers from no such limitations, so there is no reason for NVIDIA to use PCIe.