EVGA GTX 980 Classified Nvidia GeForce
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,134 words · ~5 min read
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the 980 classified from EVGA has been out for a little bit now and while we've
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been tied up with things like the miner oil project we thought better late than
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never so here we go by the way I suggest you guys stay subscribed as a little
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bird may have told me that whole room water cooling part one is probably
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coming
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soon from December 13th to 20th 2014 you
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can save on select Intel CPUs KN and ssds with special holiday rebates from
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select retailers click now to learn
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more let's start with a brief overview of how the referen gtx980 stacks up
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against the gtx980 classified EVGA has
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increased the effective memory clock of their 4 GB of vram by an earth
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shattering 10 megahertz this may seem a
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little bit funny but it's actually a very good idea gtx980 cards are equipped
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with auto balancing power rails which take the total power of the card is
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allowed to use and instead of having it a hard split between the core and memory
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they allow it to be used as a pool and allocated to whichever you prefer EVGA
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seems to have recognized this and has widely focused their power budget on
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their core overclock instead of their memory overclock which improves
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performance by a lot more than memory overclocking itself increasing the base
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clock speed from 1126 to 1291 MHz and
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the Boost clock speed from 1216 to an actually Earth shattering 1393 MHz but
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we'll take that even further later on the I has been altered but going from
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the stock set up of dvii one HDMI and
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three display ports to dvii one DVID one
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HDMI and one DisplayPort this feels like a strange Choice given that g-sync
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displays require DisplayPort to enable g-sync on them and given that display
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port can be inexpensively adapted to dvii I would have preferred to have left
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this as the default config the car is also slightly longer than the reference
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at 11 in and a lot taller at 5.94 in
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compared to the stock cards 4.36 7 Ines
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these size changes were made to accommodate the Monstrous ACX 2.0 cooler
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the cooler features dual 100 mm fans with 11 blades each just above the
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extremely large heat sink EVGA claims that it will perform 26% cooler and 36%
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quieter than a reference card and our testing it was able to impressively keep
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this card at a relatively cool 68 de while overclocked and under heavy load
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we don't have an acoustic chain bird yet so I can't tell you exactly how loud it
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was but even when we made it suffer it wasn't annoying amongst the sleek black
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shroud and red accenting we also found a tastefully illuminated logo that in a
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standard configuration at least will face out of your case but what's that
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just above the logo is that a BIOS switch does this card support dual BIOS
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no it does not it has triple BIOS support the three BIOS modes allow you
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to have your TDP change when you change the bias modes and also change the fan
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curve accordingly the three modes are ln2 mode overclocking mode which is just
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a slightly more tame version of ln2 mode and normal mode for the casuals out
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there in the box you'll find a poster a DVI to VGA adapter two nicely seed dual
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six pin to eight pin adapters a case badge various EVGA pamphlets and a
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non-conductive film just in case you want to switch to another aftermarket
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cooler overclocking was simple enough with auto balancing power rails I
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recommend you only really focus on your core clock speed just so you know I
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cranked voltage and then power limit and then started fiddling around with the
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core I found it went above a I found if it went above a certain threshold GPU
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boost would kick in and throttle the card back down to exactly 1450 MHz this
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was a little odd as GPU boost is usually a little bit more Dynamic than that but
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regardless after applying a core clock of plus 110 I found myself with an
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allaround overall St stable overclock of 1570 MHz the highest we've been able to
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achieve on a GTX 980 of any kind so far
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after pouring over my benchmarking numbers it was fairly clear that this was a significant boost over the
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reference 980 also please note that Shadow of Mordor has an FPS cap of 100
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so both the reference 980 and the classified card were both capped off as
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with all of our GPU reviews we're using our standard test bench the specs for
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which you can I guess find on the screen you're looking at right now and all of
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the graphics cards that are used in this test are overclocked if you want to see
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my settings for them you can check the link in the description down below
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speaking of down below what could be lower than Audi's price for a month's
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membership you might be able to answer that question after listening to money
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Master the game seven simple steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins after
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recently listening to a TED Talk hosted by Tony Robbins I've been interested in
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his works and if you're interested in them as well you can listen to them
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while driving commuting or on public transit working out doing almost
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anything as long as you can have an earbud in if that sounds interesting to
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you head over to audible.com SL Linus
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and give their monthly membership a try you get an Audi book with your month and
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any audiobooks beyond that one have a fairly Hefty discount so check out
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audible.com and I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself all right guys comment down
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below what you thought about this graphics card like dislike the video
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subscribe share all those kind of things if you want to jump off YouTube jump
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over to lips.com I'm sure there'll be a forum post about this which you can
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probably find in the description of this video if Nick did all those things
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correctly uh check out new office. line Tech tips.com if you want to see how the
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thank you guys for watching I'll see you next
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time
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he