back at PX East in March I said I was intrigued by the release of the GTX 980
Kingpin from EVGA due to the announcement of the Titan X there was a
lot of discussion in the comments as to whether or not this card would end up
being worth it compared to the potential price increase of said Titan X well now
the Titan X has been out for a while let's see how it Stacks
up Intel's new 750 series ssds utilize
the NVMe standard providing speeds we've never seen before on consumer storage
drives click now to learn more first up
we have the cards Mojo it's performance Hardware evga's front running GTX 980 is
rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 cudak cor equipped GM 204 chip of
1304 and a boost clock of 1418 EVGA has
increased the standard setup of 4 GB of 256bit gddr5 memory by 10 MHz resulting
in an effect of 7,000 And1 MHz compared
to the reference card 7,000 MHz the unboxing experience of a Kingpin card is
usually quite awesome and this was no exception it came solidly packed with
beautiful foam all over the place to the point that I could actually repurpose
this for keeping other cards safe and nice in the future for standard
accessories if you have a driver DVD which you can throw away because you can
just download it from the NVIDIA website a multilanguage manual an OC guide and a
whole bunch of other pamphlets and papers and whatnot it also included a
small army of adapters including mini DisplayPort to full DisplayPort mini
DisplayPort to HDMI mini DisplayPort to DVI VGA to DVI dual Molex to six pin
and 8 Pin to dual six pin the Kingpin is massive as it should be standing a fair
amount taller than the rest of our other kind of reference style gpus the back
plate is absolutely beautiful and should fit in amongst basically any design
scheme it even has little cutouts to feature some of the badass looking
Hardware on the back also you may notice that it is mostly calls itself
classified all over the cooler but never fear there's a little cutout on said
back plate revealing the Kingpin branding on the PCB now EVGA expects
people to be interested in water cooling this card and because of that they did
something that may seem a little weird at first but it's actually really cool
taking a look at the io you can see there's a DVI port an HDMI port and
three mini display ports and no that's
it no full-size DisplayPort and specifically all of these are on one
line which is awesome because if you water cool this card you can turn it
into a true single slot card due to no IO being on the second row freaking cool
the cooler features dual 100 mm double ball bearing fans with 11 blades each
just above an extremely large heat sink rocking five massive straight heat pipes
and one bendy one it features evga's memory and mosfet cooling plate plus
which they claim will reduce memory temperature by up to 7° C and mosfet
temps by up to 8° C the mmcp comes in
two pieces so if you plan on cooling the GPU directly you can continue to use the
mosfet cooling part of it a nice touch EVGA claims that their ACX 2.0 cooler
will perform 26% cooler and 36% quieter
than a reference card and in our testing was able to impressively keep this card
at a relatively cool 70° while overclocked and under heavy load we
still don't have an acoustic chamber yet so I can't tell you exactly how loud it
was but even when we made it suffer it wasn't very annoying and it was
relatively quiet all the time yes that was essentially the same result that we
had with the classified 980 which is unsurprising as it's essentially the
same cooler this is beastly enough that EVGA has the fans not even running while
it's below 60° straight from the factory if you want to learn how to do this on
your own check out Linus' video here the
Kingpin takes two 8 Pin power connectors and one six pin power connector along
with a beastly 14 plus 3phase fully
digital vrm sitting on top of a super solid 12 layer PCB if that wasn't enough
for you they also have a three-stage BIOS switch including normal
overclocking mode and ln2 mode along with thermal sensors onboard voltage
checkpoints evbot support and obviously
the most important thing full LED color
control allowing you to color match it to whatever your build theme may be just
before we get into the performance section I'd like to remind you guys of a
few little nice Tech pieces that NVIDIA has left inside including things like
SLI Cuda and GeForce experience and all
the new stuff that was introduced with the gtx980 like mfaa Dynamic super
resolution and Delta color compression which you can learn more about in
Linus's original 980 launch video by
clicking here or possibly even here overclocking the Kingpin was definitely
more interesting than a reference 980 as there's a lot more power in thermal
headro to play with I hooked up a multimeter to the voltage checkpoints
and used evga's classified voltage tool to increase voltages to an actual of
1.35 volts which resulted in a lot more
available power while maintaining a wonderfully low temperature of 70° c and
a power readout of 385 Landing this card between a
reference 980 and a Titan X in terms of power which is exactly what I expected
after setting the BIOS to overclocking mode I cranked the power limit up and
increased the core clock by an offset of 135 and the memory clock by 200 you can
check out all the settings for this card and other cards in the overclocking dock
Linked In the description down below there was also no surprises in terms of
performance it edged out the 290x Vapor X and left a fair gap between itself and
the reference 980 but still trailed by quite a bit when compared to the front
running Titan X also something to note here if you didn't watch a performance
review of grand theft Auto 5 is that while both these teams did release a
driver specifically for this game it seems to favor the Green Team quite a
bit so keep that in mind when looking at these numbers in conclusion this card is
quiet cold and Powerful a great combination is it worth it well
technically if you're going for performance per dollar no but you
shouldn't really be looking at a Kingpin card if you're going strictly for performance per dollar anyways so I'll
say it definitely depends I could see
this card Bridging the Gap for some people people to go from here to a Titan
X it would cost you about $250 to $300
plus or minus a lot depending on your region so if it's in the budget for sure
go for a Titan X but if you want a bit more than a 980 but don't quite have the
budget for a Titan X which isn't surprising as a Titan X costs more than
my first car this may be the card for you all right guys you guys think this
card slots well between a 980 and a Titan X well it is a 980 so above a
reference 980 and a titanex let me know in the comments down below like dislike
subscribe share follow uh any other buttons that might
be around the video in the description you can see things like cool Linus
techtips shirts I think we're finally going to have an actual Linus Tech tips
branded one soon so that could be cool also in description you can see the
overclocking Dock and various other things over on the Forum you can comment
there and I'll have a much higher likeliness of actually reading it um
also you can see our support us link where you can see more of our merch more
of our our supporters and sponsors and whatnot and you can see how to change
your Amazon affiliate code which helps us a lot also become a contributor on
the Forum that's like the best thing in my opinion anyways thanks for watching
and I'll see you guys next time