Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 and 980 reference review -
Product Showcase
One of the key ingredients to the GTX 970 and 980 is their high performance vapor chamber cooling. Built from copper, this vapor chamber draws heat off the GM204 GPU using an evaporation process that’s similar to a heatpipe, but more powerful. Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters Nvidia will try to force as much performance out of the cards at a maximum threshold of 80 Degrees C.
With new grease and the copper vapor chamber, they’re able to draw more heat off the GM204 chip over the older designs, ultimately allowing the GPU to run cooler and thus boost to higher clock speeds. This heat from the vapor chamber is then dissipated by a large, dual-slot aluminum heatsink.
GeForce GTX 980 also features an extended fin stack, the heatsink fins actually extend beyond the base of the vapor chamber, increasing cooling area. The GeForce GTX 970 and 980 cards also have an aluminum base-plate, which provides additional cooling for the PCB and board components. And finally, a blower-style fan exhausts hot air out the back of the system chassis. Underneath the GeForce GTX 980’s metal shroud lies an aluminum heatsink. Embedded in the base of this heatsink are three copper heatpipes which are responsible for drawing heat off the GPU. Both cards will have two 6-pin PEG power connectors, and yes, there's plenty room left for overclocking.
A 4+1 phase power supply is responsible for supplying the GPU and memory with power. One additional phase power supply is dedicated for the board’s GDDR5 memory.
This 4+1 phase design supplies the product with the power it needs. Tweaked we’ve seen boards with reference cooling hit speeds of over 1.4 GHz in our own testing! In fact, with some custom boards we've already reached 1.5 GHz!!
We review the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER, NVIDIA has launched a new Super graphics cards, as in super-charged in a super range of what they deem super products. GeForce RTX 2080 Super is based on a Turin...
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 review
In this review we test the GeForce GTX 1070 (Nvidia Founders Edition). The 8 GB graphics card is the somewhat limited little brother of the GTX 1080, this little demon on the Pascal architecture and 1...
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 review
We review the all new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (founders edition). The new 8GB beast based on the Pascal architecture and 16nm FinFET has arrived. It's cool, it's silent and it rocks hard when it com...
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
In this review we look deeply into the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Everything you heard is true, this product is based on BIG Maxwell, the same GPU that is powering the Titan X. Obviously the product has been...