Gadgetory

back at PAX East in March I said I was intrigued by the release of the GTX 980 kingpin from EVGA due to the announcement of the Titan X there was a lot of discussion in the comments as to whether or not this card would end up being worth it compared to the potential price increase of said Titan X well now the Titan X has been out for a while let's see how it stacks up Intel's new some 50 series SSDs utilize the nvme standard providing speeds we've never seen before our consumer storage drives click now to learn more first up we have the cards mojo its performance hardware EVGA is front-running gtx 980 is rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 CUDA core equipped GM 204 chip of 1304 and a boost clock of 14 18 EVGA has increased the standard set up of 4 gigabytes of 256 bit gddr5 memory by 10 megahertz resulting in an effect of seven thousand and ten megahertz compared to the reference card seven thousand regards the unboxing experience of a kingpin card is usually quite awesome and this was no exception it came solidly packed with beautiful foam all over the place to the point that I could actually repurpose this for keeping other cards safe and nice in the future for standard accessories if you have a driver DVD which you can throw away because you can just download it from the Nvidia website a multi-language manual and OC guide and a whole bunch of other pamphlets and papers and whatnot it also included a small army of adapters including mini DisplayPort to full DisplayPort mini DisplayPort to HDMI mini DisplayPort to DVI VGA to DVI dual molex to 6-pin and a pin to dual 6 pin the kingpin is massive as it should be standing a fair amount taller than the rest of our other kind of reference style GPUs the backplate is absolutely beautiful and should fit in amongst basically any design scheme it even has little cutouts to feature some of the badass-looking hardware on the back also you may notice that it is mostly calls itself classified all over the cooler but never fear there's a little cutout on set backplate revealing the kingpin branding on the PCB now EVGA expects people to be interested in water cooling this card and because of that they did something that may seem a little weird at first but it's actually really cool taking a look at the i/o you can see there's a DVI port an HDMI port and three mini display ports and note that's it no full-size DisplayPort and specifically all of these are on one line which is awesome because if you water cool this card you can turn it into a true single slot card due to no I being on the second row freaking cool the cooler features dual 100 millimeter double ball-bearing fans with 11 blades each just above an extremely large heat sink rocking five massive straight heat pipes and one bendy one it features EVGA x' memory and mosfet cooling plate plus which they claim will reduce memory temperature by up to 7 degrees Celsius and mosfet temps by up to 8 degrees celsius the MMC p comes in two pieces so if you plan on cooling the GPU directly you can continue to use the mosfet cooling part of it a nice touch the EVGA claims that their a CX 2.0 cooler will perform 26 percent cooler and 36 percent quieter than a reference card and in our testing was able to impressively keep this card at a relatively cool 70 degrees while overclocked and under heavy load we still don't have an acoustic chamber yet so I can't tell you exactly how loud it was but even when we made it suffer it wasn't very annoying and it was relatively quiet all the time yes that was essentially the same result that we had with the classified 980 which is unsurprising as it's essentially the same cooler this is beastly enough that EVGA has the fans not even running while it's below 60 degrees straight from the factory if you want to learn how to do this on your own check out Linus's video here the kingpin takes 2 8 pin power connectors and one 6 pin power connector along with a beastly 14 plus 3 phase fully digital vrm sitting on top of a super solid 12 layer PCB if that wasn't enough for you they also have a three-stage bios switch including normal overclocking mode and ln2 mode along with thermal sensors onboard voltage check points et baz support and obviously the most important thing full LED color control allowing you to color match it to whatever your build theme may be just before we get into the performance section I'd like to remind you guys of a few little nice tech pieces that NVIDIA has left inside including things like SLI CUDA GeForce experience and all the new stuff that was introduced with the GTX 980 like mfa a dynamic super resolution and delta color compression which you can learn more about in Linus's original 980 launch video by clicking here or possibly even here overclocking the kingpin was definitely more interesting than a reference 980 as there's a lot more power and thermal Headroom to play with I hooked up a multimeter to the voltage check points and used EVGA is classified voltage tool to increase voltages to an actual of 1.35 volts which resulted in a lot more available power while maintaining a wonderfully low temperature of 70 degrees Celsius and a power readout of 385 lining this card between a reference 980 and a Titan X in terms of power which is exactly what I expected after setting the BIOS to overclocking mode I cranked the power limit up and increase the core clock by an offset of 135 and the memory clock by 200 you can check out all the settings for this card and other cards in the overclocking dock linked in the description down below there was also no surprises in terms of performance it edged out the 290x vapor-x and left a fair gap between itself and the reference 980 but still trailed by quite a bit when compared to the front running Titan X also something to note here if you didn't watch a performance review of Grand Theft Auto 5 is that while both these teams did release a driver specifically for this game it seems to favor the Green Team quite a bit so keep that in mind when looking at these numbers in conclusion this card is quiet cold and powerful a great combination is it worth it well technically if you're going for performance per dollar no but you shouldn't really be looking at a kingpin card if you're going strictly for performance $4 anyways so I'll say it definitely depends I could see this card bridging the gap for some people to go from here to a Titan X it would cost you about 250 to 300 dollars plus or minus a lot depending on your region so if it's in the budget for sure go for a Titan X but if you want a bit more than a 980 but don't quite have the budget for a Titan X which isn't surprising as a Titan X costs more than my first car this may be the card for you alright guys you guys think this card slots well between a 980 and a Titan X well it is a 980 so above a reference 980 and the Titan X let me know in the comments down below like dislike subscribe share follow any other buttons that might be around the video in the description you can see things like cool Linus tech tips shirts I think we're finally going to have an actual Linus tech tips branded one soon so that could be cool also in description you can see the overclocking dock and various other things over on the forum you can comment there and I'll have a much higher likelihood of actually reading it also you can see our support us link where you can see more of our merch more of our our supporters and sponsors and whatnot and you can see how to change your Amazon affiliate code which helps us a lot also become a contributor on the forum that's like the best thing in my opinion anyways thanks for watching I'll see you guys next time