Gadgetory

so this video is about the value or lack thereof and spending more on your graphics card to get a higher factory overclock or fancier cooler or bored design when you're not going to be overclocking sorry for not overclocking we've covered that quite heavily in the past and it just isn't the point here as we're specifically trying to investigate the worth of factory overclocks there will also only be one manufacturer included EVGA why because they have an excessively high amount of gtx 980 models they have 10 that's insane but wait why 980 you've made a billion 980 videos in the past and it's value proposition isn't even that good anymore good that's not the point I'm not trying to tell you what card to buy I'm just investigating the potential value in factory overclocks this video is also not sponsored I contacted EVGA because they were a prime example of totally creo mounts of different card versions and they agreed to send me 4 cards as long as I sent them back there was no financial exchange and we don't get to keep the cards we gain nothing from this other than a video and spoiler alert if you're not overclocking don't buy the most expensive version of a card but stay tuned to find out why Phoenix collections art or mechanical keyboard comes complete with gold-plated cherry MX brown switches an aluminium coating and a full 104 key layout check out the link in the video description to learn more although many graphics card manufacturers sell multiple cards with the same GPU perhaps the most well-known and excessive example of this is EVGA which currently has 10 different versions of the GTX 980 so we decided to take four well-known models from this product stack and see well how they stack up today we've got the reference the superclocked the for the win addition or FTW edition and classified editions of the GTX 980 all of these cards including the reference model came with EVGA ACX 2.0 cooler except for the classified which contains a larger version of the cooler due to its larger PCB and more aggressive power delivery so what exactly do you get with these four models the reference card sells for the same amount as a card with a reference cooler about 500 US dollars and is essentially the same as a completely reference designed card except for the a CX 2.0 heatsink for 10 bucks more the superclocked Edition features about a 150 mega Hertz higher boost clock but no other significant upgrades another 10 dollars will score you the FTW Edition which not only gets you another modest clock bump but also a second BIOS chip for further customization and a 6 plus to power phase design for more overclocking Headroom as opposed to the 4 plus 1 on the less expensive models finally the classified serves close to a no compromises card for extreme overclockers it features a beefy 14 plus 3 power phase system and a third BIOS chip including ln2 mode which we'll get more into later you also get a small increase in out-of-the-box clock speed though this will all set you back a whopping six hundred and thirty five dollars far more than the other three cards so how did we test all this well we used our standard test bench however to get a more accurate idea of the cards thermal performance we put the entire test bench into our cooler master master case pro 5 obviously - the bench self with its default fan configuration instead of using an open-air test bench we ran all of our components at stock speeds also by the way the first thing we want to check out was the performance of GPU boost in our first video on the topic which you can see out here we found that there's a fair amount of variation even among otherwise identical cards but also that the advertised boost clocks tend to be conservative estimates of what you'll actually get in real world gameplay with our EVGA stack we mostly saw the same thing as the reference superclocked and for the win editions all saw load clocks that were faster than what were advertised with the reference and for the win additions both exceeding the official specification by over 35 megahertz however the classified fell a little short for whatever reason but as most people who will buy this card will probably be overclocking it's not a huge concern but not good for me the way the ACX 2.0 cooler did give us better performance over the reference cooler which lets Nvidia cards get up to 83 degrees Celsius before thermal throttling the highest we saw on our EVGA stack however was just under 75 degrees under load the classifieds larger cooler didn't actually really make it any cooler than the other cards though it does have a much larger vrm to cool down and if you were overclocking more you might see a performance difference there now let's have a look at real-world performance in games the out-of-the-box overclocks on the non reference cards did give us some slight performance gains in 4k with the superclocked Edition adding 2 to 3 fps and the for the win Edition adding another 1 to 2 on top of that they classified actually fared the worst of the three overclocked cards again I suspect most people in the market for something like a classified won't be running it at default speeds anyways and could squeeze a bit more performance out of it like we've seen in the past with our classified reviews but still today however we're looking at what card will give you the best performance out of the box and the for the win Edition walks away the winner I'll be it by a very small margin since the difference between the for the win and the reference a CX card is only twenty dollars it may be worth it to spend the extra on a higher clock out of the box and more overclocking Headroom with extra power phases you can squeeze it into your budget and even if you're not an overclocker you may think it's well worth the 20 bucks to get a little bit more performance out of the box without having to play with anything so in conclusion if you're trying to pick between stepping up an entire class of graphics card or just getting a better cooler and overclocking solutions on them maybe jump up an entire class of graphics card that's what I would recommend but if you've got 10 20 maybe 30 bucks lying around getting a better slightly higher tuned or better cooled or better power phase designed graphics card can actually be kind of worth it an interesting insight and unless you're looking into overclocking just don't get the top-end one just don't get like a couple steps in unless you want it for the looks I guess but that's on you man Squarespace is a simple platform for building powerful and beautiful websites starting at only 8 bucks a month and with a free domain if you sign up for a year you get 24/7 live chat and email support for your website whether you're going for their larger awesome templates or even one of their cover page designs more focused on a singular page they also have support for things like e-commerce if you intend to sell products and a responsive design so that your website can be seen optimally on all screen sizes tablet desktop phone whatever start a trial today with no credit card required and start on building also be sure to use offer code Lynas to get 10% off of your first purchase Squarespace build it beautiful thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon buying a cool t-shirt like this one we actually have that store kind of working now or with the direct monthly contribution through the forum now that you're done doing all that kind of stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click this thing in the top right hand corner to check out an old video where I actually overclocked the graphics card and it was a high-end model and I showed how that's actually kind of cool