MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gaming OC Review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.

So the MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti is offered as a 'Gaming OC' Edition. As you can see, MSI overhauled their board from the reference design. You will spot a nice matte black PCB with eight phases and two 8-pin power headers for a little more overclocking headroom. The PCB is as mentioned matte black in color, and of course the new revision TwinFrozr V cooler is being used. These cards will look just terrific in a dark themed PC.

Board partners will be able to release the Ti model cards in their own configurations, including different cooling solutions. During Computex we already showed a thing or two, other designs with launches later in the month. This is the OC edition of the Gaming series, meaning it has higher factory clocks, quite impressive as well. The default mode base clock is clocked at 1178 MHz, with a boost allowance up-to 1279 MHz.The memory is clocked at a modest 7.1 GHz (effective data-rate) on its 384-bit wide memory bus of 6GB GDDR5 memory.

The card itself is a dual-slot solution, it is composite heat-pipe based, the GPU is cooled by a nickel-plated copper base plate connected to Super Pipes (8mm heat pipes) on this MSI GAMING series graphics card. A new SU heat pipe layout increases efficiency by reducing the length of unused heat pipe and a special SU-form design. Fun fact: Zero Frozr technology eliminates fan noise in low-load situations by stopping the fans when they are not needed Up-to roughly 60 Degrees C, the fans won't even spin.

The card will have a power design of roughly 250 Watts, but due to the high clocks and extensive tweaking design please add 10, maybe 20 extra Watts, this card is ready for some sheer raw rendering performance. Two 8-pin power headers in combo with component selection like Hi-c CAPs, Super Ferrite Chokes and solid capacitors should be plenty for a nice tweak (or two). Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well.