Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers next to snot net and I am here to tell you about so taks new 980 extreme overclocking video card mostly I'm here to tell you not to buy this thing this one is better if you don't know what this is it's the reference gtx 980 and that might sound a little crazy so let's get into that first of all the specs this thing is slightly overclocked before you receive it it has a 13 93 megahertz boost clock whereas the stock card has 12 16 megahertz more or less that's not really something that matters in the real world where reality is because you can overclock the reference part to this which is about 170 megahertz in about 50 seconds or less if you're you've never done it before that's probably how long it would take so why do I get this well in theory you can overclock this even higher still higher than the pre overclock that they ship it at because first of all the GM 204 that's the GPU in here the semiconductor that Nvidia makes the one that is in the GTX 980 the GM 204 is binned out by ZOTAC they are selecting a higher quality chip to put in the 980 extreme which is a limited edition run so because they're selecting a higher quality chip in theory the ASIC quality is higher so in theory you can overclock higher because it's got better tolerance for higher frequencies and voltages which are what you are playing with when you're overclocking so it should be pretty good but it's also got an aftermarket cooler this is probably the only thing that is legitimately well designed on this video card just so you know other than stuff that's supplied by Nvidia obviously so this is using a single intake man in the center with two exhaust fans flanking on the left and right and what that does is basically it pushes the air straight down onto the GPU the exhaust fans that pull that air push it out the sides out of the back at the top all of those places so that the fins are cooled adequately and there's no there's no stagnant air getting stuck in there from a tripl intake setup which has happened in the past so this should cool it down better which means you can overclock higher means you can over volts higher because it's not going to get as high not gonna shut down for for thermal reasons now in addition to this it's got to 8-pin power intakes whereas the input for the gtx 980 reference is two six pins that gives us a lot more overhead this thing can push something like 435 watt TDP that's the maximum allowed by the GM 204 from what ZOTAC told us the two 8-pin intakes will allow for at least 400 watts of power which means we can push this thing a higher in frequency and push it higher in voltage because it's got more power to eat from in terms of the supply before it needs to throttle back on the clocks further the GTX 980 extreme biotech has this marketing module as I call it is called OC plus and affectionately has many other names using other mathematical symbols like - and OC plus is a USB connected it connects straight to a micro USB which would be slightly larger than your phone charger connects it to one of those plug that into your motherboard USB IO panel slot that you always plug your USB 2.0 IO into and then it's supposed to read all the voltages and everything straight into the computer into something into their software called firestorm so here's the thing if you've overclocked cards before you might be wondering the same thing I was which was why can't I do that anyway doesn't doesn't windows already know by nature of these sensors in the GPU by nature of the thermal probes by nature of all these things that it's checking to the talking communicating went through the CPU to Windows doesn't it know what the voltage is doesn't it know what the clocks are how else would harbour monitor house with GPUs II know all of the settings on your card when it doesn't have one of these USB modules because most video cards do not have one and I also attack that and they said that it is required for better control of the voltage so that's what we were told and we'll get more into that in a moment as you can tell I am very fond of this tool called fired so that's sort of the overview of this card now it technically has other marketing features like power boost which is a fancy name for solid capacitors that are covered by a piece of metal to make it look cooler and as little power boost on it and then when you install the video card that where power boost is upside down so that's a cool feature I guess it also has red and green LEDs that you can toggle on and off but you can't change the color of it turns green when it's idle red when it's under load they are also installed on the underside so all the light goes down where you can't see it especially if you've got a case with a side panel that cuts off the bottom part of the panel the window rather because there's nothing to see there so it's great design and I'm very excited about it there should be LEDs in the back plate now this is I should mention does have a backplate just like the reference gtx 980 that is something nvidia is doing standard now with all of their 980 cards ZOTAC has copied this design and modified it slightly to make theirs it look like carbon fiber it's still a backplate though and offers that extra support which is needed because the video card takes up two-and-a-half expansion slots that means it's pretty big so if you want to use two slots for PCI Express and then one underneath it for video capture for a sound card for really anything that would normally go on that PCIe x16 sixteen or eight slots you're gonna have trouble because it's not gonna fit because this is gigantic and also it might get slightly suffocated for air depending on how big that card is or at least the exhaust will be partially covered up if nothing else and so tech calls there are more exo-armor it doesn't have the removable backplate like the reference one does the reference one has a very small slot up here that you can remove it for SLI so that the sli configurations can breathe better the zotac does not do that because there's it's different they strayed from the reference design quite a bit they actually have a custom PCB this thing goes up very high not only is it fat it's pretty tall too so it's still kind of fit in basically every case more or less I won't I won't include many ITX cases and that no promises still fits but this kicks up so high that it would potentially become a concern for things like an SLI bridge and I tested this the SLI bridge fits okay in terms of this height does not fit okay in terms of this height if you have a triple SLI bridge that bleeds over so you need to get something that's smaller and more compact or you could just not buy this video card and especially not two of them so um the the card is fully detailed now we can talk about why it's getting such a bad rap and is the butt of many jokes in this video this thing was supposed to be the overclocking car card not card that would be pretty cool though and I would like review samples of those this is supposed to be an overclocking video card that was going to end all overclocking video cards when it comes to air cooling it was very heavily marketed as such it has such promise with the cooler and really sounded good on paper the stock clock is pretty high it's got this fancy PWM whatever module that's supposed to do special stuff that didn't do those things but it sounded like it would when we first heard about it and really it should overclock and it were volts very high because it's got these two eight pin power intakes or inputs I should say so it can draw more power you can sustain a higher voltage and thus a higher clock none of that happened what happened is I plug this thing in I benchmarked it then I started overclocking it and their fire storm saucer broke several times so I started using an EVGA precision an afterburner by MSI those worked a little bit better but I found out I couldn't over volt beyond 1212 millivolts or 1.2 1 2 volts the stock card so you know this thing right here from Nvidia is cable over vaulting up to 1.25 6 volts and that extra that extra point 0 3 ish volts is actually huge that is a gigantic different and it makes the difference between a high sustained overclock and sort of a mediocre boring overclock closer than the 1500 megahertz range and that's exactly what happened and the reason the voltage is locked is twofold first of all we we assumed my team assumed that it was a bios issue a B bios issue I told ZOTAC I gave them two weeks I said fixed by us make it so that the voltage is unlock so we can push one point two five six volts at a bare minimum if not more because this thing should be able to handle more because it looks pretty solid in terms of design but looks aren't everything and they came back and said no it's a software issue it's because of our firestorm software here try this and they gave me a different version of firestorm let's slow that down if you've ever overclocked hardware it is not the hardware that is dependent on the software the hardware will do basically whatever you tality within the the hard limits set in BIOS that's pretty important to know the software if this thing could push 1.25 whatever volts or higher precision should be able to do it afterburner should be able to do it firestorm whatever that I guess should be able to do it but they can't and firestorm can only do it if you've got this plugged in and none of the other software can do it if you have this USB thing plugged in even though reference can so it's almost like DRM it's sort of like an iPod of being forced to use iTunes in order to overclock and that goes over to and harness a listen to music and this being forced to use firestorm to overclock is sort of comical because it goes against everything overclockers stand for they are hackers by nature they want to use whatever software they want to use and because this module doesn't actually add any functionality in terms of things you can tweak except well you'll see in the article it doesn't really add very much all it does is unlock something that you can already do with every other video card on the market normally through whatever software you want to use so that's sort of annoying and that's part one of why this thing is limited to one point two one two votes and if you had the special press only version of the software one point two five six and that will be distributed to handpick to overclockers so I guess they you're not trusted to do it if you're not special the second reason this can't over volts very high and is stuck is because the BRM is bad it is my very strong speculation based on facts and sources that the vrm in this was selected perhaps before the GTX 980 spec was revealed by Nvidia maybe that's just my really strong speculation so if it was picked before the spec was released by an Nvidia ZOTAC maybe bargained for a little bit more or less than what happened in reality the result is a vrm that connect cannot handle the stock reference over voltage of one point two five six volts instead it's pretty stuck to one point two volts and be BIOS will tell you that they have not updated B BIOS as I sort of demanded because the hardware can't handle it because the vrm is bad because the pita pwm is a very drm like in nature and probably bad and so we're limited we're limited in what we can over volt and less limit how we can overclock and those limits are shown in gpu-z which is the standard tool for third-party checking of specifications on a video card it shows in gpu-z because gpu-z will not report a higher voltage than 1.2 volts on this and talking to ZOTAC they said you need to use firestorm to see the voltage accurately because v bios is limited to 1.2 volts and we're using this OC plus whatever the by put bypassed the v ID and bios and push higher voltage but every tool I've used including firestorm seems to say this cut stuck at one point to firestorm in fact is worse than that because half the time it doesn't even apply though overvoltage I asked it to apply other times it doesn't report voltage at all it says zero volts which hopefully that's not happening that'd be sort of like having a zero BPM heart rate and it also says you're a lots half the time so firestorm weather everything they said can be true that's fine all of that can be true about the VI D V by us all of that perfectly true whatever it's just to say it is it doesn't matter because I can't trust firestorm to tell me anything accurate about this video card and when I test it in games and when I use tools to log the boost clock it can't push higher than a reference card that I spent maybe an hour doing a hard overclock on and I spent far more time on this a few days up to a week perhaps I'd rather not think about it but the GTX 980 reference getting into the numbers forget all this this thing 980 reference from Nvidia that I've tested already can overclock to fifteen sixty point three megahertz boost that is the boost clock with that's a 295 megahertz offset from base base is something like eleven twenty six on this and twelve sixteen boost so quite a big offset to be able to push fifteen sixty that's stable that's with a 30-something millivolt over voltage and that voltage is applied correctly that makes it run at one point two five volts which is the maximum voltage of the reference card and it cools reasonably it's in the 50s or something after subtracting for ambient a little bit lower but it's in that area so it cools well enough now this cooler would be much better but still that's that's sort of where it stands the memory overclock I think I pushed about 400 megahertz memory overclock other websites have done closer to 800 that really wasn't my concern I was more interested in the boost clock anyway and this thing though I should note with Max while overclocking you use power percent target or power target percent rather when you're overclocking the reference card can go to 125 percent of TDP of being the multiplication so 125 percent times TDP which is like 170 ish more or less that means it can take effectively 25% more watts from base that it can then apply to your over voltage in your clock so you can obtain sustain and run stabili the higher clocks so that's a very quick rundown on Maxwell overclocking this thing can go to 111 percent TDP and it is using I got it up to 1500 and like 20 megahertz somewhat stable with some texture flickering and blues blue flickering on the screen which any overclockers would be familiar with through fire strike the benchmarking software so it's about 40 megahertz lower than what I did on reference it cost $60 more it runs maybe five to ten degrees cooler Celsius that's somewhat substantial but it can overclock as high so why and $60 more why you'd be better off buying the asus strix or EVGA is cards or waiting on kingpin or even like a messiah has some good cards there are a lot gigabyte gigabytes g1 can do a much higher voltage it can do like 1 point something and saying one point four one point six something like that it can sustain a way higher overclock way higher over voltage why would you buy this it's $20 more to get something insanely better and with really a pretty similar cooler setup unlike the aftermarket cooler so that's sort of the rundown on this you've seen all the charts by now running through the video I've just kind of been popping them up over my face so that you can see the benchmarks check the link in the description below to see the full details where I talk about all the story leading up to now all my complaints and emails and Skype messages I sent this out attack their us marketing team is fantastic I want to thank them for tolerating my insistence that this video card should be much better and does not and thank them for pushing all of my complaints to the PM team which failed to deliver so that is these are gtx 980 extreme it should have put them on the map it sadly did not I hope I sincerely am saddened by this and I hope that next time they can do better if there is a next time for an overclocking card please do not buy this please buy something like a gigabyte g1 instead or really anything at all is Asus Strix the reference card this thin $550 overclocks better I would not recommend running this at the 15 60 megahertz overclock I did 24/7 it's probably not too good for the cards health if you're an overclocker you don't care about the cards house you know that it won't die before you replace it with a new Toyota overclock anyway but do be careful how hard you push these things because even this one at a higher overclock like that 15 21 I was running with 111 % TDP that's gonna start beating up this is the silicon pretty quickly and wear it out so that is the 980 extreme I'm sorry I could not bury you better news but hopefully I saved you some money check out our links and articles and all that stuff to learn more about this video card why it failed and what other companies can learn about it and I will see you all next time peace