Gadgetory

but on the thermal side you have more phases hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're talking about the gtx 980 video card so this is old news the 980 came out about a year ago but why are we talking about it now well nvidia has now put out the gtx 980 in notebooks and this is particularly interesting because the fold desktop GPU is what's being moved to notebooks and that's unheard of really up until this point you generally find a slimmed down version of the same GPU same architecture in notebooks so the gtx 980 em would be all that was available at the high end up until this point and at the very best you'd find two of them in sli and things like the GTA t which is a an MSI notebook that has a mechanical keyboard so i had two of them in sli but the gtx 980 em is about thirty-five percent less powerful than the desktop gtx 980 and if you look at any mobile component and vidya intel or AMD all three of them make the same decisions where they're slimming down their offerings in order to fit the portables format so when I say mobile or portables in this video I'm referring to things like laptops whether their desktop replacements like this one this is an MSI gt70 to that's been rebranded by CyberPower or they're thinner options like the Auris which is another unit that has the GTX 980 coming out and that's I think less than an inch so we're going to cycle through a bunch of images of laptops in this video all of them that you're looking at the exception of this one are items that have the GTX 980 in them and the thing we're focusing on here today is going over the specs the 980 verse 29 ATM the expectations and the overclocking Headroom offered by a GTX 980 which is somewhat generous compared to the previous mobile or portable offerings by Nvidia and the Intel all of them really so it's it's pretty interesting stuff we don't have a full review yet but it is forthcoming I have a couple of systems on the way and obviously until we get that review up I would advise you to hold your purchases and wait to see what we actually think of it when it's performing but we're going to talk about how it looks on paper they what you're looking at right now is a chart of the GTX 980 m and the GTX 980 specs and it should be noted that the nine ATM despite its name is not the same as the desktop 980 it uses the same base Maxwell architecture and it even uses the GM 204 GPU but it's been modified so some cores are disabled you see 1536 cores versus 2048 on the GTX 980 desktop unit which is now found in notebooks just to clarify that and the 9 ATM has a 10 38 megahertz base clock against the 11 26 megahertz base clock of the GTX 980 as found in notebooks and desktops and that difference is actually fairly big and will show an impact in gaming FPS we've tested this in the past especially with the 980 TI and you'll also see that 980 has a significantly higher texture fill rate you can see our other video on the channel search the channel for texture fill rate or filter rate to learn more about that it's got more TM use faster memory higher bandwidth and a memory capacity of either 4 or 8 gigabytes depending on the OEM with the 980 I'm shipping in basically the same 8 gigabytes but a lot fewer TM use and slower memory and things like that the GTX 980 is promised to be about thirty five percent faster than the GTX 980 m and about two times faster than the gtx 880 am which had a somewhat short seeming lifespan in the face of the 900 series launch even on mobile and portable units and if we look at the concerns here the big one is going to be thermal dissipation and this is something that we specialize in testing when it comes to this type of technology so we'll certainly be looking at that as it comes out but we did have a hands-on session with the GTX 980 in several notebooks and got a quick feel for how it all works so the main items of note here are that the GTX 980 in notebooks has a minimum requirement of a four-phase vrm imposed by Nvidia on the manufacturer and that's actually significant because the vrm phases normally in a notebook you'll see maybe three phases on average but if you're at four eight which is the range that nvidia has imposed then you've got more phases to spread the heat across and that will allow for obviously you get cleaner voltage delivery so you have a more stable clock if you're overclocking that's important for overclocking but on the thermal side you have more phases so that you have more physical space and more chokes more capacitors and potentially stronger MOSFETs where you're setting and feeding all the power through so that should one clean the power as I said end to it should mitigate the heat generated in the process of feeding voltage to the GPU itself so that's one of the main items for helping with the thermals and with the overclocking potential on the overclock inside and vidya has stated that it is a fully unlocked GPU for overclocking you can tune the base clock frequency basically until it stops working you can tune the memory frequency as expected also until it stops working and then in their new suite which is being skinned by the OEM manufacturers you can set a custom fan curve so that's pretty familiar and uninteresting to a lot of us it's the same as you see in precision or afterburner any of the other software where you can just set a fan curve based on your needs so those needs are normally going to be a battle between performance thermally and FPS wise and noise levels if you want lower noise levels you set a less aggressive fan curb which means you run hotter but quieter for overclocking there is no control over the voltage right now so you can't over volt the desktop version of the GTX 980 as found in a notebook even though you can in a desktop version and there's also no power percent target control so you're stuck at a hundred percent of the power target at all times which in the desktop version the actual desktop version that you find in desktops you have some Headroom to increase it 110 / 725 % depend on your BIOS manufacture things like that and I gives you more Headroom to overclock so there are limitations and those limitations are likely bound by things like thermals and TDP but when we asked our overvoltage Nvidia told us in our meeting that it is a distinct possibility that they will be looking into for the future but at launch / Bolton will not be available for the gtx 980 as found in notebooks what you're looking at now is the only benchmark that we have available it was provided by Nvidia so massive truck of salt recommended they normally are fairly accurate I'll say but our testing methodology does differ from theirs and ours is based obviously in being objective and unbiased so we will be testing this ourselves to validate everything but this does give us a base look at the frame rates in the games shown and is generally reliable they say The Witcher 3 runs in the 60 FPS range at ultra 1080 which is a very big promise and if it can be done on notebooks which it should be able to because it can be done on the desktop version then that's a big gain for NVIDIA a couple of interesting things here test methodology for the GTX 980 and notebooks will be unique because we're testing a component we have a desktop version of but we don't have the same CPU RAM things like that because a laptop you find like the i7 4720 HQ or similar and different ram speed or pin count certainly and voltages and things like that so there's a lot of disparity in the hardware normally we have a constant bench and all we change is the various video cards in this case we're going to have two different laptops will be testing this gtx 980 M laptop against a new GT 72 same model with a 980 so that's easy but the disparity comes in when we start looking at desktop cards vs the 980 laptop which will do just because it's desktop which desktop in terms of GPU architecture and GPU performance so that'll be fun to do but it will be a unique challenge and test methodology we'll talk all about that in the video which is out in terms of these laptops they should be dropping no later than October fourth from some manufacturers others will have them available for order effectively immediately at the posting of this video we are yet unsure of prices I'm sure they'll all be live by the time this video's up because we're under embargo so you're seeing it in the future for me and again just hand onto those purchases until we review it look at it analyze it and see if it's actually worth your money as always we'll give the full look and all that once we have some in hand and that is all for this video if you like this kind of content check out our patreon page in the post roll video for ways to help support us continue making this type of content and definitely check for the new video we just uploaded on how to build a grounding cable not totally related to this content but pretty fun stuff to know if you're building computers and working with components regularly so that's all for this time I will see you all next time