Product Showcase

Product Showcase: GeForce GTX 980

Let's start with our photo-shoot. Two pages worth of photos then and all of them from our own photo-shoot.

So as you can see, this is the ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 980 Poseidon. Bear in mind that we test the Poseidon model specifically, which comes with a faster standard clock frequency. A DIGI+ VRM has been asigned together with a strong 10-phases.
 

ASUS has built a custom board that differs from the reference design. You will spot a custom PCB with 10 phases and both a 6 and 8 pin power header for a little more overclocking headroom. 

The card is 29cm in length with the cooler included. This Poseidon series has higher factory clocks, the GPU core base clock is ticking over at a 1179 MHz core GPU clock frequency with a 1278 MHz Boost frequency. The card is sized 11.3 " x 5.4 " x 1.6 " Inch - 28.7 x 13.7 x 4.06 Centimeters.

The memory has been kept reference at 7.0 GHz (effective data-rate) on its 256-bit wide memory bus of 4 GB GDDR5 memory.

Overall ASUS is keeping their ROG style in all black and red. Especially with the new design DirectCU H2O cooler it is a very nice looking product. At the top side you can see connectors for liquid cooling, but as stated, the card works fine without it as well.

The card features 10K capacitors (5x the lifespan of standard capacitors) along with better thermal thresholds (offering higher and lower temp thresholds), fully molded alloy based inductors (chokes) which reduce or eliminate coil whine while also offering improved performance across a number of metrics.