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Nvidia's GTX980 has been one of their greatest success stories in the last decade. While we have reviewed almost every partner board available, today we look at something very special – the new KFA2 GeForce GTX980 ‘8Pack Edition'. Overclockers UK resident overclocking world champion Ian ‘8Pack' Parry has been working with the company to produce one of the world's fastest air cooled cards. This solution is not only shipped at very high overclocked speeds, but it has been the recipient of uprated Capacitors and VRM components.
Nvidia's Maxwell architecture has been dominating the graphics sector for the last year. The GTX750ti was a warning shot across the bow for AMD – a super efficient GPU with more powerful siblings waiting in the wings. Some time later, the GTX970 and GTX980 hit market without an answer. AMD's power consumption is still a concern and until their next generation of cards hit later this year Nvidia have been able to run amok in the high end.
| GPU | GeForce GTX 750ti (Maxwell) | GeForce GTX 960 (Maxwell) | Geforce GTX 970 (Maxwell) | GeForce GTX 980 (Maxwell) | Geforce GTX Titan X |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 5 | 8 | 13 | 16 | 24 |
| CUDA Cores | 640 | 1024 | 1664 | 2048 | 3072 |
| Base Clock | 1020 mhz | 1126 mhz | 1050 mhz | 1126 mhz | 1000 mhz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1085 mhz | 1178 mhz | 1178 mhz | 1216 mhz | 1076mhz |
| Total Video memory | 2GB | 2GB | 4GB | 4GB | 12GB |
| Texture fill-rate | 40.8 Gigatexels/Sec | 72.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec | 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 192 Gigatexels/Sec |
| Memory Clock | 5400 mhz | 7010 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 86.4 GB/sec | 112.16 GB/sec | 224 GB/s | 224 GB/sec | 336.5 GB/sec |
| Bus Width | 128bit | 128bit | 256bit | 256bit | 384bit |
| ROPs | 16 | 32 | 56 | 64 | 96 |
| Manufacturing Process | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
| TDP | 60 watts | 120 watts | 145 watts | 165 watts | 250 watts |
The new GM204 GPU is very efficient. The Maxwell SM has been rebalanced so that the CUDA cores are fully utilised more often. Doing so saves power and enhances overall performance. The L2 cache size in the GM204 is 2MB, or four times larger than the GK104. The addition of extra cache means that fewer requests to the GPU memory are needed – again reducing power consumption and pushing more performance.
The Geforce GTX 980 is equipped with 7Gbps memory. Those of you with higher resolution monitors, or running in a multi screen configuration will also be pleased to hear that there is 4GB of GDDR5 memory on the card, not 3GB – this memory will push 224 GB/s sec. Nvidia have added a new compression engine to reduce the demand on DRAM bandwidth.
The KFA2 Geforce GTX980 ‘8Pack Edition' has received a mighty impressive core clock enhancement to 1,304mhz – from 1,126mhz on the reference design (boost speed 1418mhz). The GDDR5 memory is running at the default 1,753mhz speeds (7Gbps effective) but we believe there will be huge potential for overclocking, later in the review.
Aren’t the clockspeeds of this card the exact same of the KINGPIN 980 from EVGA?
Yes same clocks. Ian’s card offers high performance out the box without the need to block it, KPE you need to block it and rely on the beefed up VRM plus Vince said it’s built for LN2. Only the Asus GTX 980 20th Anniversary Gold Edition offers higher factory clocks at 1431MHz, and again beefed up VRM.
Still not as high a clock as the 980 Classified…
INCORRECT. The stock clock speed for the 980 Classified is 1442MHz. I would know, I own one.
See?
INCORRECT. The stock clock speed for the 980 Classified is 1442MHz. I would know, I own one.
Factory clocks are minimum clocks, what they vary to during gaming/benchmarking is another matter as well as filtered chips and the game in question. Good to see yours doing well even though your voltage is showing it at the maximum of 1.212V to give it that increase in clocks.
If the graphs here also stated the max boost clocks during each test it would make comparisons a little easier, only performance indicator is the FPS. All relevant when talking about benchmarking cards at stable maximum attainable clocks.
Nope, that’s all stock how this card came. I can even hit a stable 1585MHz OC.
Good to know. Post your max OC 3D11 score to compare to this card, I have a huge interest in GPUs and benching 🙂
I don’t use 3D11. also with benchmarks like that my CPU becomes an issue with bottlenecking. I’ve had a friend beat my score in Unigen Heaven with a 970 because he was using a 4770k vs my FX-8320… I can’t wait till the 6700K comes out! 😀
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Will be irrelevant when GTX 980ti ships out this or next month.