gtx980 questions

[Singular1ty]

Hi all,

I'm looking to buy a 980 soon, but which one? Personally I love the reference design so either the evga or ocuk, but evga is £60 more, for what looks like only around 10% extra clock out of the box. Is there more that I would get with the evga card?

Also, since I use 3 screens with my radeon 7950, I use a mini displayport to dvi active adapter. would I be okay to buy 2 display port to mini dp and then run the mini dp to dvi active adapters on there, or would I need to buy 2 display port to dvi active adapters?

 

[philo-sofa]

The more expensive custom boards often have a few enhancements on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and better cooling. The former and the latter nominally affect overclock potential, whilst the latter can obviously result in quieter and cooler operation. The thing is a reference 980 will overclock to pretty close to the same speeds as a custom design. This is because the silicon in the 980 is such a low power draw chip that so the standard PCB doesn’t need enhancing and the current cooler is more than enough. This wouldn’t be the case for example with an R9 290X, which draws close to twice as much power and needs all the PCB and cooling improvements that board makers can think of.

One additional thing that you gain with Nvidia cards is an enhanced ability to adjust the thermal limit that auto-limits speed based on power draw. For the custom designs Nvidia certifies up to a 125% of standard TDP, but I think reference designs are stuck at 110%.

So you lose relatively little: a slightly quieter operation, the automatically set overclocks, and a maximum overclock that’ll be 1-5% below the non-reference card and slightly more aggressive throttling based on TDP. If you’re comfortable doing your own overclocking you’ll end up with 95% the performance and that awesome metal cooler for £60 less, which makes sense to me. I have zero idea about active DP adapters though; sorry