Gadgetory

hey what's up guys James $0.02 here and I am bringing you what I believe is the very first review of MSI's new gtx 980ti gaming 6g graphics card this was actually one that was highly highly requested by the audience because people are quickly becoming a big fan of msi and what they're doing with the gaming line and you guys wanted to see it well guess what they reached out to me and we are the first ones to get our hands on it the octane gaming gear combo from coolermaster features seven backlighting colors turbo mode a vago 3050 optical sensor along with four levels of dpi adjustment now you can po noobs without boning your wallet click the link in the description to learn more you guys know how we do these reviews a lot of people have asked me why I'm not doing a live benchmarking anymore which is where I was playing a game on you know the card while talking about it that's because I can't get as much done with the video it takes longer to create that video meaning the video is longer and I don't get to show you guys as much as I want to so I'd rather keep the information more concise especially when we're looking at a graphics card here that you know it's this is the fourth time we've take a look at a 980ti so if I had to make some early predictions with this card I say that it would pretty much perform better than reference and right around you know where the other custom boards are that we've taken a look at now back in the beginning MSI's twin frozer was pretty much just a custom cooler that was put on to a reference card in fact my 680 that I used to have was an MSI twin frozer that I was able to put a reference ek water block on because like I said it was just a reference card but that's not the case anymore MSI has really gone above and beyond when it comes to their gaming line where they're bringing you more than just reference stuff with better cooling on there they are bringing you full custom PCBs custom cooling options I mean they've really gone all out to make these cards absolutely fantastic and as best as they possibly can now let's go ahead and start with the cooler since that's you know the thing that you always see it is a red and black as their standard cooler and they did on the 960 offer a green and black one which was an anniversary or a kind of a milestone commemoration card of them selling something like 100 million graphics cards so the standard color is red and black which you know it's going to kind of clash with some people just looking to do builds that maybe your blue orange green black that is it would look it just all black but if you're going for like a stealthy build then the black and red would probably not be your thing but with that said if it is your thing and you don't mind the fact that it's red and black you are going to find two large 100 millimeter fans on here with lots of fins which are going to give you good static pressure through the massive heatsink that's on here giving you tons and tons and tons of surface area for cooling we've got four heat pipes in here there copper heat pipes that are nickel-plated they do believe it looks like they're a mix of six and eight millimeter pipes on there so you're going to get a lot of cooling and they do run the length of the card now instead of like some graphics cards that are running them long ways when it comes to the heat pipe they are running a bend design where they come up and down through the front and the back and then the heat is dissipated out the bottom of the card and the top of the card so instead of long straight heat pipes that come out the back they are coming out the top and out the bottom as you can see now the vrm on this is cooled by a heat sink but it is not touching the major heat sink in fact the VRMs & MOSFETs here have their own black heatsink that are it's pretty beefy actually the whole rear portion of the card is a heatsink that's under the main cooler so the downdraft air of this cooler is going to be cooling off that heatsink so I guess it's going to we're going to see how the overclocking does on this thing if the vrm start to get hot fortunately on the nvidia side the VRMs don't tend to get incredibly hot like they do on AMD where AMD cards can be held back by terrible vrm cooling that doesn't usually seem to be the case with Nvidia graphics cards so I don't anticipate this here being a problem now does require to 8-pin PCI Express power plugs and that is because this is a custom PCB as I mentioned before speaking of custom PCB it is a tall PCB as you can see here it is taller than the mounting point here for the bracket so you can see this is going to be pretty a pretty high card when it comes to height so you're going to want to make sure that this fits in your case make sure you check out the specs for that before you go buying this card if you're putting this and say a small form-factor build but other than that if you're using a standard chassis I don't see this being any sort of an issue on the top right here you have an MSI logo that does light up white it is not an RGB it does not change color but it is white and it does show when you have your graphics card oriented the normal way as you can see it's just it's very attractive-looking that this is this is kind of the side you're going to see right there when it's installed and it does look pretty damn good speaking of looking nice they have what I think are one of the best looking back plates on the market with its blast bead blasted finish but polished dragon logo on there so you can see depending on how the light hits it you know you do have the there we go there's the light there's the light you do have your dragon logo which is kind of ghosted into there and then you've got holes on the back here as well to let heat out of the backplate so it doesn't become an insulator so the back plates giving rigidity to the card but also allowing there to be airflow through the backplate which isn't going to you know insulate any sort of heat in there now before we stick this on the test bench is one other thing worth mentioning of course you have two sli fingers on here because it is capable with four-way SLI but there is no there's no other BIOS on this it's a single BIOS card so if you're going to be doing BIOS flashing you definitely want to pay attention to what you're doing because you could easily break this card if it was a dual BIOS card you could you know flash back using the other BIOS but other than that I don't see there really being any reason to do BIOS flashing I I did it on my Titans and I did it on my standard 980 s and I didn't see any sort of improvement but anyway that really comes down to ASIC quality and overclocking and voltage so we'll talk about that in a different video if you guys want me to talk more about ASIC quality and where it stands and how it affects overclocking maybe I'll do a video on that tell me in the comments if you guys want to see that so with that out of the way let's go ahead and benchmark this thing and let's see how it does I already have a pretty good idea of how it's going to do I don't think it's going to be any surprise but let's go ahead and find out anyway transition well the numbers should be absolutely no surprise to you honestly because this is the 4th 980ti we've taken a look at and it is the second custom PCB board that we've looked at and they are pretty much right in line with each other I mean we're talking one or two FPS difference at the most which is easily accounted for and margin of error I mean different things running in the system even though I make sure all background processes are ended you know there's a lot of different things that can happen that can account for one or two fps not to mention we're not running at the exact same you know frequency on all of the cards now this card was running fifteen hundred and fourteen megahertz which was nice to see a solid speed above 1500 that's kind of been the magical number lately for graphics cards is 1500 especially on the Mac Maxwell architecture we've got over 1500 on GM 204 which was like really awesome because we thought well if GM 204 can do 1500 then GM 200 would probably do a lot less because that was kind of the way it was back in the past with Kepler and Fermi but this time around we're still exceeding 1500 megahertz even on the big GPU so that's nice to see where you get all the CUDA cores and the core speed to go along with it now I've become more and more impressed with MSI's time goes on back when their Twin Frozr was nothing more than an upgraded cooler on a reference card to them upgrading you know the Twin Frozr over time through various generations I believe this is the Twin Frozr 5 cooler on here now and now the gaming series cards custom PCBs completely designed from the ground up all cooling aspects considered RAM is cooled VRMs are cooled backplate looks fantastic on there and I think it really shows that a brand like MSI is really working hard to compete to earn your hard-earned dollars I mean when it comes to buying a graphics card you know that there is just so any options out there it can become very very daunting it's like it's like going clothes shopping with the wife right if you're married you have a girlfriend you go gone clothes shopping with them you know you've you've got to look at every little thing you've got to try on every single thing and unfortunately graphics cards are that way there's just so many of them but it looks good as long as you're looking for a red and black build of course that is a going to be a turn-off for people that are building a blue system or a green system or just a plain stealth black system so if you're into the red and black then it's definitely going to be a cooler that looks really really nice the white glowing LED on top gives you a little bit of added bling and of course the nickel-plated heat pipes in the cooler just make it look it's kind of got that racing header feel so it's really neat in terms of aesthetics I think MSI is really nailed it on the head and I think that's why they stuck with this cooler through the 980ti generation instead of going with you know twin throws or six or whatever they're maybe working on the last thing I wanted to mention was the lack of coil wine you know one of the things people really complained about with the nine seventy cards was coil wine was absolutely terrible well there's zero coil wine in this card in fact this card got up to 69 percent fan speed and still remained extremely quiet quieter than the pump and the system fans that are on the radiator and keep blowing air across my motherboard so they've done a fantastic job at making sure that your gaming experience is not intruded upon or intrudes upon interpret upon words are not my forte okay I don't even know forte is the right word but MSI has done a great job at making sure that your games are not going to be interrupted by the sound of at least your graphics card anyway the rest of the system is entirely up to you so there's my two cents on the msi 980ti gaming 6g from well msi i think it's a fantastic card you really can't go wrong with it the performance is there the sound level is low the coil whine is non-existent in overclocking is clearly there at over 1500 megahertz on this sample which is a retail sample so I I assume it would be pretty near at least 1450 or higher that would be my guess as to where pretty much most cards would land in so that's all for today if you guys have enjoyed today's video and you happen to stumble across here wants go ahead and click that subscribe button it doesn't kind anything other than a little bit of your time which you know admittedly you'll never get back but maybe you'll learn something and you know we're going to have a lot more tutorials and things coming up here in the near future if you guys are already subscribed to the channel make sure you head on over to social media that's where I spend a lot of my time on Twitter and the Facebook every now and then I admit I'm not the greatest Facebook or out there I I think it's just I don't know I don't know what it is about Facebook it's personally not my thing but I do what I can to try and keep everybody happy so anyway guys I'm go ahead and get the heck on out of here we got a lot more coming up and I better get back to work so with that go ahead and others - and get the heck out of here