MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gaming OC Review - Product Showcase

The GTX 980 Ti Gaming OC 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 30% in performance over the GeForce GTX 980.

The PCB board design is custom from MSI build upon their Military Class standard. It is a bit of marketing yes, but the component selection does follow MIL-STD-810G certification, these components have proven to be able to withstand the torturous circumstances in both gaming and overclocking. 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. MSI 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 the TwiNFrozr series V cooler.

For those that wonder, the board is equipped with Hynix memory ICs.

At the rear of the card you can spot 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 MSI logo, this is LED enabled and 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; MSI offers five. This does come at a cost, as you can see there is just little air exhaust now. Most heat will be dumped inside the PC, good ventilation as such is a must. 

3 x DisplayPort
1 x HDMI
1 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 Ultra HD TVs (myself included).
 

The MSI logo with dragon on the top side is configurable as to on/off or some animation like flashing, breathing etc. My advise, keep the default, just on.