EVGA GeForce GTX 980 K|NGP|N - Is it the King??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,469 words · ~7 min read
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back at PX East in March I said I was intrigued by the release of the GTX 980
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Kingpin from EVGA due to the announcement of the Titan X there was a
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lot of discussion in the comments as to whether or not this card would end up
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being worth it compared to the potential price increase of said Titan X well now
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the Titan X has been out for a while let's see how it Stacks
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up Intel's new 750 series ssds utilize
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the NVMe standard providing speeds we've never seen before on consumer storage
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drives click now to learn more first up
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we have the cards Mojo it's performance Hardware evga's front running GTX 980 is
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rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 cudak cor equipped GM 204 chip of
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1304 and a boost clock of 1418 EVGA has
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increased the standard setup of 4 GB of 256bit gddr5 memory by 10 MHz resulting
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in an effect of 7,000 And1 MHz compared
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to the reference card 7,000 MHz the unboxing experience of a Kingpin card is
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usually quite awesome and this was no exception it came solidly packed with
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beautiful foam all over the place to the point that I could actually repurpose
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this for keeping other cards safe and nice in the future for standard
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accessories if you have a driver DVD which you can throw away because you can
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just download it from the NVIDIA website a multilanguage manual an OC guide and a
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whole bunch of other pamphlets and papers and whatnot it also included a
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small army of adapters including mini DisplayPort to full DisplayPort mini
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DisplayPort to HDMI mini DisplayPort to DVI VGA to DVI dual Molex to six pin
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and 8 Pin to dual six pin the Kingpin is massive as it should be standing a fair
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amount taller than the rest of our other kind of reference style gpus the back
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plate is absolutely beautiful and should fit in amongst basically any design
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scheme it even has little cutouts to feature some of the badass looking
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Hardware on the back also you may notice that it is mostly calls itself
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classified all over the cooler but never fear there's a little cutout on said
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back plate revealing the Kingpin branding on the PCB now EVGA expects
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people to be interested in water cooling this card and because of that they did
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something that may seem a little weird at first but it's actually really cool
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taking a look at the io you can see there's a DVI port an HDMI port and
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three mini display ports and no that's
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it no full-size DisplayPort and specifically all of these are on one
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line which is awesome because if you water cool this card you can turn it
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into a true single slot card due to no IO being on the second row freaking cool
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the cooler features dual 100 mm double ball bearing fans with 11 blades each
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just above an extremely large heat sink rocking five massive straight heat pipes
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and one bendy one it features evga's memory and mosfet cooling plate plus
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which they claim will reduce memory temperature by up to 7° C and mosfet
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temps by up to 8° C the mmcp comes in
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two pieces so if you plan on cooling the GPU directly you can continue to use the
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mosfet cooling part of it a nice touch EVGA claims that their ACX 2.0 cooler
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will perform 26% cooler and 36% quieter
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than a reference card and in our testing was able to impressively keep this card
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at a relatively cool 70° while overclocked and under heavy load we
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still don't have an acoustic chamber 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 very annoying and it was
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relatively quiet all the time yes that was essentially the same result that we
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had with the classified 980 which is unsurprising as it's essentially the
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same cooler this is beastly enough that EVGA has the fans not even running while
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it's below 60° straight from the factory if you want to learn how to do this on
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your own check out Linus' video here the
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Kingpin takes two 8 Pin power connectors and one six pin power connector along
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with a beastly 14 plus 3phase fully
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digital vrm sitting on top of a super solid 12 layer PCB if that wasn't enough
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for you they also have a three-stage BIOS switch including normal
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overclocking mode and ln2 mode along with thermal sensors onboard voltage
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checkpoints evbot support and obviously
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the most important thing full LED color
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control allowing you to color match it to whatever your build theme may be just
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before we get into the performance section I'd like to remind you guys of a
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few little nice Tech pieces that NVIDIA has left inside including things like
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SLI Cuda and GeForce experience and all
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the new stuff that was introduced with the gtx980 like mfaa Dynamic super
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resolution and Delta color compression which you can learn more about in
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Linus's original 980 launch video by
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clicking here or possibly even here overclocking the Kingpin was definitely
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more interesting than a reference 980 as there's a lot more power in thermal
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headro to play with I hooked up a multimeter to the voltage checkpoints
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and used evga's classified voltage tool to increase voltages to an actual of
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1.35 volts which resulted in a lot more
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available power while maintaining a wonderfully low temperature of 70° c and
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a power readout of 385 Landing this card between a
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reference 980 and a Titan X in terms of power which is exactly what I expected
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after setting the BIOS to overclocking mode I cranked the power limit up and
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increased the core clock by an offset of 135 and the memory clock by 200 you can
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check out all the settings for this card and other cards in the overclocking dock
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Linked In the description down below there was also no surprises in terms of
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performance it edged out the 290x Vapor X and left a fair gap between itself and
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the reference 980 but still trailed by quite a bit when compared to the front
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running Titan X also something to note here if you didn't watch a performance
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review of grand theft Auto 5 is that while both these teams did release a
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driver specifically for this game it seems to favor the Green Team quite a
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bit so keep that in mind when looking at these numbers in conclusion this card is
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quiet cold and Powerful a great combination is it worth it well
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technically if you're going for performance per dollar no but you
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shouldn't really be looking at a Kingpin card if you're going strictly for performance per dollar anyways so I'll
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say it definitely depends I could see
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this card Bridging the Gap for some people people to go from here to a Titan
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X it would cost you about $250 to $300
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plus or minus a lot depending on your region so if it's in the budget for sure
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go for a Titan X but if you want a bit more than a 980 but don't quite have the
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budget for a Titan X which isn't surprising as a Titan X costs more than
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my first car this may be the card for you all right guys you guys think this
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card slots well between a 980 and a Titan X well it is a 980 so above a
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reference 980 and a titanex let me know in the comments down below like dislike
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branded one soon so that could be cool also in description you can see the
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there and I'll have a much higher likeliness of actually reading it um
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the Forum that's like the best thing in my opinion anyways thanks for watching
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and I'll see you guys next time