so this video is about the value or lack thereof in spending more on your
graphics card to get a higher Factory overclock or fancier cooler or board
design when you're not going to be overclocking sorry for not overclocking
we've covered that quite heavily in the past and it just isn't the point here as
we're specifically trying to investigate the worth of factory overclocks there
will also only be one manufacturer included
EVGA why because they have an excessively high amount of GTX 980
models they have 10 that's insane but
wait why 980 you've made a billion 980 videos in the past and it's value
proposition isn't even that good anymore good that's not the point I'm not trying
to tell you what card to buy I'm just investigating the potential value in
Factory overclocks this video is also not sponsored I contacted EVGA because
they were a prime example of totally cray amounts of different card versions
and they agreed to send me four cards as long as as I sent them back there was no
Financial exchange and we don't get to keep the cards we gain nothing from this
other than a video and spoiler alert if you're not overclocking don't buy the
most expensive version of a card but stay tuned to find out
why Phoenix collection's aour mechanical keyboard comes complete with goldplated
Cherry MX Brown switches an aluminum coating and a full 104 key layout check
out the link in the video description to learn more although many graphics card
manufacturers sell multiple cards with the same GPU perhaps the most well-known
and excessive example of this is EVGA
which currently has 10 different versions of the gtx980 so we decided to
take four well-known models from this product stack and see well how they
stack up today we've got the reference the super clocked the for the win
Edition or FTW Edition and classified
editions of the gtx980 all of these cards including the reference model came
with evga's ACX 2.0 cooler except for
the classified which contains a larger version of the cooler due to its larger
PCB and more aggressive power delivery so what exactly do you get with these
four models the reference card sells for the same amount as a card with a
reference cooler uh about $500 and is essentially the same as a
completely reference designed card except for the ACX 2.0 heat sink for 10
bucks more the superclocked Edition features about a 150 MHz higher boost
clock but no other significant upgrades
another $10 will score you the FTW Edition which not only gets you another
modest clock bump but also a second BIOS chip for further customization and a 6
plus2 powerphase design for more overclocking headro as opposed to the 4
plus one on the less expensive models finally the classified serves close to a
no compromises card for extreme overclockers it features a beefy 14
plus3 powerphase system and a third BIOS
chip including ln2 mode which we'll get more into later you also get a small
increase in outof the Box clock speed though this will all set you back a
whopping $635 far more than the other three cards
so how did we test all this well we used our standard test bench however to get a
more accurate idea of the card's thermal performance we put the entire test bench
into our Cooler Master master case Pro 5 obviously minus the bench itself with
its default fan configuration instead of using an open air test bench we ran all
of our components at stock speeds also by the way the first thing we wanted to
check out was the performance of GPU boost in our first video on the topic
which you can see out here we found that
there's a fair amount of variation even among otherwise identical cards but also
that the advertised boost clocks tend to be conservative estimates of what you'll
actually get in Real World gameplay with our EVGA stack we mostly saw the same
thing as the reference superclocked and for the win editions all saw load clocks
that were faster than what were advertised with the reference and for
the win editions both exceeding the official specification by over 35 MHz
however the classified fell a little short for whatever reason but as most
people who will buy this card will probably be overclocking it's not a huge
concern but not good for me either way the ACX 2.0 cooler did give us better
performance over the reference cooler which lets NVIDIA cards get up to 83°
cus before thermal throttling the highest we saw on our EVGA stack however
was just under 75° underload the classifi larger cooler didn't actually
really make it any cooler than the other cards though it does have a much larger
vrm to cool down and if you were overclocking more you might see a
performance difference there now let's have a look at real world performance in
games the the outof thee boox overclocks on the non reference cards did give us
some slight performance gains in 4k with the superclocked Edition adding 2 to
three FPS and the for the win addition adding another one to2 on top of that
the classified actually fared the worst of the three overclock cards again I
suspect most people in the market for something like a classified won't be
running it at default speeds anyways and could squeeze a bit more performance out
of it like we've seen in the past with our classified reviews but still today
however we're looking at what card will give you the best performance out of the box and the for the win Edition walks
away the winner albeit by a very small margin since the difference between the
for the win and the reference ACX Card is only $20 it may be worth it to spend
the extra on a higher clock out of the box and more overclocking Headroom with
extra power phases if you can squeeze it into your budget and even if you're not
an overclocker you may think it's well worth the 20 bucks to get a little bit
more performance out of the box without having to play with anything so in
conclusion if you're trying to pick between stepping up an entire glass of
graphics card or just getting a better cooler and overclocking Solutions on
them maybe jump up an entire class of graphics card that's what I would
recommend but if you've got 10 20 maybe 30 bucks lying around getting a better
slightly higher tuned or better cooled or better power phase designed graphics
card can actually be kind of worth it an interesting insight and unless you're
looking into overclocking just don't get the topend one
just don't get like a couple steps in unless you want it for the looks I guess
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you're done doing all that kind of stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click this thing in the top
right hand corner to check out an old video where I actually overclocked the
graphics card and it was a high-end model and I showed how that's actually
kind of cool