Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming SOC Review - Product Showcase

The GTX 980 Ti Gaming G1 SOC takes advantage of Maxwell architecture with its GM200 based GPU, it has 8 billion transistors, 2816 active shader processor cores, and 6 GB of GDDR5, it’s quite a powerful product. In Ultra HD it can advance up-to 25 maybe 30% in performance over the GeForce GTX 980 as we found out. The PCB board design is custom from Gigabyte build upon their Ultra Durable standard with a 2oz copper PCB and the usual gear like solid capacitors, Ferrite Core chokes, DrMOS MOSfets. The 6GB GDDR5 memory used on this board is based on Hynix ICs.

The GPU empowering the product is called the A1 revision of the GM200 GPU, which is based on Maxwell architecture, but we'll talk a little more about Maxwell in the tech deep-dive on the next few pages. The GTX 980 Ti has a lovely 2816 CUDA/Shader/Stream cores and a base clock frequency of roughly 1000 MHz baseclock on the reference model, this one runs a baseclock of 1241 MHz.Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters Gigabyte will try to force as much performance out of the cards at a maximum cooling threshold of roughly 70 Degrees C for this 980 Ti model with 600W WindForce cooler.

At the top of the card you can see the two 8-pin power headers. The reference designs all have one 6-pin header and a n 8-pin header. So that should get you a little more juice into the card for a better tweaking experience. To the middle you can see the WindForce logo, this is LED enabled and color configurable.  The card as you can see is SLI compatible up-to 4-way SLI. Our generic advice is to stick at two cards maximum for the best compatibility, scaling and experience. 

GeForce GTX 980 Ti in its reference design will offer five display connectors; Gigabyte offer six. This does come at a cost, as you can see there is no air exhaust now. All heat will be dumped inside the PC, good ventilation as such is a must. You will get 

3 x DisplayPort
1 x HDMI
2 x Dual-Link DVI

The display engine is capable of supporting the latest high resolution displays, including the all new 4K and 5K screens. And with HDMI 2.0 support, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti can even be used by gamers who want to game on the newest state-of-the-art big screen TVs (myself included).