INTRO
The sheer size of the ASUS GTX 980 STRIX OC Edition – quite the mouthful – is quite a beastly looking GPU. In short, this card beats most GPUs in its price range (all pricing in this article refers to the Australian prices), apart from something like the almighty lord of rendering, the Nvidia Titan X, of course. To test this card I used only synthetic benchmarks, because they give a reasonable representation of the performance the GPU is capable of outputting. With some games, you may receive a higher frame rate (FPS) within the game itself. At a later date I will also test to see if that statement holds true.
The ASUS GTX 980 is based on the GM-204 GPU — The second GPU based on Maxwell Architecture to be released by Nvidia. It seems a little strange that at this point they only had three GPUs on the market, but have slowly released low end cards, and now a newer chip that is used with the GTX980ti.
Photos
Stock GPU clock speeds
OCed GPU clock speeds
It should be noted that both GPU-Z and Nvidia Inspector demonstrate Memory Clock speeds in the same way, but GPU-Z shows 2000Mhz instead of 4000Mhz (3999Mhz), though they work out the same in the end. I’ll try not to confuse you anymore than I already have. The overclock listed above is my specific GTX 980’s maximum overclock, with both the memory and core speeds increased to a stable 1416Mhz. The GPU allowed me to get around 1490 or 1500Mhz on the core as well, but that would be unstable in a handful of games. Granted, I could have pushed the GTX 980 a little further if I removed the memory overclock, but I wanted it to be @ 8000Mhz over the former 7000Mhz (not a lot of difference, but this increases the GPU bandwidth by a bit).
Benchmarks
The GTX 980 was tested with the 353.38 Hotfix Driver at the time of benchmarking, due to Nvidia releasing an unstable driver update — 352.86 — which didn’t want to run The Witcher 3 without stuttering (more than usual). Although this is a Hotfix Driver, it seems to have fixed some stuttering and crashes for The Witcher 3, so I stayed away from testing it with slightly older drivers. With that said, The Witcher 3 was not used as a test for article. All utilities and games were running at 1920×1080, simply due to not being able to acquire either a 1440p or 4K monitor as of yet.
My benchmarking methodology comes down to three things: Run the benchmark two or three times completely maxed out under all stock conditions; run it again with my GPU overclock (OC) enabled; and finally, run the benchmark with the settings that I would enable personally. I hope my results help you determine if the GTX 980 is the card for you or not. Keep in mind that all of these benchmarks are synthetic, which means they aren’t necessarily going to represent in-game performance, but give you a base idea as to what to expect when it comes to YOUR in-game FPS experience.
I would also like to mention that the following results are based on a CPU and motherboard that are starting to see some age in them, but they still perform strongly, so if you have a newer CPU/motherboard (chipset) your results may vary slightly.
The test system used: