Gadgetory

we don't always get near immediate availability of non-reference designs from Nvidia's partners when they launched a new GPU but in the case of the GeForce GTX 980 g1 gaming little mouthful from gigabyte it's a good thing we did Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision cherry on X RGB key switches for sixteen point eight million color perky backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more now usually with a non reference graphics card where the board manufacturer designs their own PCB and cooler for the GPU they buy from Nvidia we run through the normal stuff improved vrm designs for more stable efficient power delivery and a longer lifespan better cooler designs for lower card temperatures and a longer life span and visual improvements that most folks will either prefer or not prefer compared to a reference board but in the case of the GTX 980 g1 gaming from gigabyte seriously I gotta stop saying that they have actually made some serious improvements here that would make me consider this card over an Nvidia designed one we'll start with the stuff that I only sorta liked the wind force cooler with its three redesigned 80 millimeter fans looks pretty good I think gigabyte could improve this in a couple ways while the random chunk of metal that increased card height for no reason is thankfully gone from the older wind force cards leaving behind a sleeker housing and the backplate is gorgeous with angular vent cutouts in a surprisingly tasteful g1i on it that wind force logo at the top needs to be RGB since blue isn't even going to match gigabytes own g1 series motherboards and the aluminum fins for the cooler need to be dark nickel-plated gigabyte does that and they'll have the best-looking cooler on the market to go along but they're quoted 600 watts of total heat dissipation a number that I truly believe based on what Luke observed about the power consumption of this card once we cranked it and the temps of the GPU not to mention that it did all of this while remaining pretty darn quiet now we can move on to the stuff that kicks ass the i/o on this board is perfect flawless victory gigabyte triple DisplayPort 1.2 ports for surround gaming with g-sync or at resolutions higher than 1440 6 DP off a single card and HDMI 2.0 and dual dual link DVI ports for folks with non DisplayPort monitors to run surround as well you can even hook up a VGA monitor with a couple scented Apter thanks to the fact that one of the DVI ports is dvi-i and carries an analogue signal this is the new i/o gold-standard guys speaking of gold standards gigabyte is calling out their processor bidding procedure in their marketing materials now that's a weird move their name for it is GPU gauntlet sorting and they're claiming that their SOC or super overclocked class cards will guarantee higher overclocking capabilities seriously this is right off their site I guess how much truth there is to this remains to be seen but if they're shipping clock speeds or anything to go by this one is rated at 13 29 megahertz boost maybe there's something to it now of course there's the usual gtx 980 technology so long with geforce experience shadowplay game recording game stream network gaming on shield devices and automatic game optimization and Driver updates and Vidya has added third generation Delta color compression to make better use of memory bandwidth dynamic super resolution a way of running less than ending games at higher res than downsampling them to the resolution of your monitor for better visuals mfa a a new less demanding anti-aliasing mode and auto asynchronous warp a VR feature that should improve the experience for users of the oculus rift or similar head tracking head mounted displays who are prone to motion sickness you can get more in-depth explanations of these technologies in my reference gtx 980 video linked here but now it's time to put this card to the test as usual we'll be overclocking not only the GTX 980 g1 gaming but also all the cards it's going up against so we shall see how it fares all right guys first up we have overclocking to see the settings for all of my cards check out the overclocking dock in the description of this video this card specifically was configured and after with a core voltage offset of 70 a power limit of 100 and 22% a core clock offset of 160 and a temperature target of 91 which resulted in its actual core clock averaging around 15 31 215 61 in terms of benchmarking results I was happy to see that the extra overclocking Headroom allowed by this card gave it enough of an advantage to achieve a clear win and all of my gaming benchmarks in both 1080p and 4k and upon further inspection I noted that it did this while maintaining a heavy load running temperature of only 70 degrees Celsius the power draw on the other hand was a little bit surprising instead of being drastically lower than our reference 780ti like our reference 980 was this wind force cooled extra power pens gtx 980 actually drew more overall system power which may suggest that gigabyte is binning leakier chips for enthusiast grade cards resulting in higher potential performance at the cost of power efficiency anyways just some food for thought and back to you guys thanks Luke so there you have it is the gigabyte GTX 980 g1 gaming and enthusiasts delight do you prefer gigabytes design that favors folks with high airflow cases and beefy power supplies or would you rather have invidious reference blower cooler that exhausts air outside of the case and lower power consumption at the cost of some GPU overclocked ability let us know in the comments speaking of the comments on this video I know they're going to be chock-full of appreciation for today's sponsor little bits there are brand new sponsor here on Linus tech tips and we think they have a pretty awesome concept and we know that many of you will agree their goal is to lead a hardware renaissance where everyone regardless of age 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