Product Showcase

Nice to see is that the product has a back-plate, something that is more common and popular these days. The card will have a maximum power design of 165 Watts, but due to the higher clocks and extensive tweaking please allow for maybe 25 extra Watts. These boards have been designed with overclocking in mind. In combo with component selection it should be plenty for a nice tweak (or two). The DirectCU H2O cooler comes with 10mm heatpipes.

There is a alot of connectivity, you'll get three full size Display Port connectors, one full size HDMI 2.0 compatible connector and one DVI connector. HDMI is 2.0 compatible meaning that compatible monitors and tellys can do UHD at 60 Hz, DP is 1.2 but has support for eDP 1.4. 

The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers, this one offers a 6 and 8 pin header. So that should allow you to get a little more amperage into the card for hopefully an improved tweaking experience. 
 

As you can see, the card has SLI connectors so if you've got cash to spend, 2, 3 and 4-way SLI are an option to pursue, though we always recommend two cards maximum for the best scaling and as few driver issues as possible. Admittedly, the design looks nice, all dark and red themed. Tweaked we’ve seen this 980 board reaching roughly 1.6 GHz (with liquid cooling) on the Turbo clock frequency, very nice but we'll talk more about that later on in this article as we will put that to the test.

At the top of the card we can see two threaded fittings for liquid cooling. Honestly, although not needed it would make little sense to purchase this card and not use liquid cooling.

We'll be connecting the Poseidon to the Zalman Reserator XT unit. It will provide more than enough cooling and will allow temperatures to hover in the 45 Degrees C range with the GPU under flat-out stress/utilization.

The two connectors are 1/4-inch threaded fittings. To the right of the fittings you can see a pulsating LED logo. The ROG LED pulsates in ROG red when the card is in use.