ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti Poseidon Review - Introduction

Taking cooling serious...
ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 980 Ti Poseidon platinum tested

We review and benchmark the coolest of them all, the ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti Poseidon Platinum ROG edition graphics card. This GeForce GTX 980 Ti based product comes factory overclocked and sports hybrid cooling up-to the level of enthusiast liquid cooling.  Armed with a massive liquid cooling block (DirectCU H2O), a custom PCB, quality components and a factory overclock this product is bound to perform, whilst staying totally silent. Combine all that with the default goodness the GeForce GTX 980 Ti has to offer like the 6 GB graphics memory and this product simply cool.

The GPU that resides on under the hood is the big Maxwell, and oh man it's a freak of nature with that kind of game rendering powah! You'd expect a product with '980' in it to have a similar slightly tweaked GPU, but no Sir. Nvidia shifted a thing or two around, the 980 Ti is based on the BIG Maxwell GPU, the same GPU that is powering the Titan X. Obviously the product has been trimmed down a tiny bit, but trust us when we say, there's plenty performance to be found. This product comes with a luxurious six Gigabytes of graphics memory and with these specs, the GTX 980 Ti should be fetching a lot of interest for the true gamers among us. The GPU empowering the GeForce 980 Ti is big, this one has a massive transistor count; it is a slightly revised GM200 A1 GPU that currently feeds the Titan X its horsepower. So yes, a slightly different iteration of the GM200. The card has five display outputs: three DisplayPorts, HDMI and DVI-I.  Where the GTX 980 has 4 GB, this product has a nice 6 GB frame buffer, and close to a third more shader processors when compared to the GeForce 980, accumulating up-to 2816 of them playing the binary game in a GPU that has a whopping 8 Billion transistors (GeForce GTX 980 has 5 Billion). The card looks pretty identical to previous models with subtle changes here and there and with that familiar cooler shroud. Memory wise NVIDIA equipped its GeForce GTX 980 Ti with 7 Gbps memory, the fastest GDDR5 memory you can find on a graphics card today, that's until HBM (stacked memory) is released by the competition in the near future. Combined with GPU Boost 2.0 you will see this product is advertised in the 1076 MHz range on its dynamic clock for the reference products. The reference base clock for 980 Ti is 1 GHz. It's not that the card can't go any higher, but it is done to keep the product in line power consumption wise. With a 250W TDP, we are not complaining at all, no Sir. For the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, monitor outputs include DVI, HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort, this will vary a little with board partner products that are bound to get released after Computex, based on their own design and cooling. With a card like the ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti STRIX you will be able to play the hottest games including the Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto V at that whopping Ultra HD 8.2 Mpixels at a 3840x2160 resolution with a single card, in fact we are going to check that out in this review. The maximum allowed board design power draw is roughly 250 Watts, not bad considering the caliber of this product.

The ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti Poseidon Platinum edition comes with a factory overclock and that hybrid cooler called the DirectCU H2O which packs two dust-proof fans, three heatpipes, a large heatsink and a water block. This means you can just use the air-cooling, but alternatively you can fire up liquid cooling as well. This is the 6 GB edition that comes factory clocked faster for you and heck you will even receive a three year warranty with this product. But have a peek at the product we test today and then head on-wards into the review.

ROG GeForce GTX 980 Ti  Poseidon Platinum edition from ASUS