Galax GTX 980 "Hall of Fame" Video Card Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,357 words · ~6 min read
0:00
We're back from CES and I'm back to graphics card reviews. The 980 Hall of
0:05
Fame Edition from Galaxy or Galaxy or
0:08
Galaxy apparently galaxy now for whatever reason has made a bit of a
0:12
splash for being very fast out of the box and having a beautiful all-white
0:16
design including their PCB. Also, for those of you that were enjoying the
0:21
affordable motherboard showdown video, never fear. I'll be working on the next
0:25
episode very soon.
0:33
Cooler Master's Casemod World Series is your opportunity to show off your
0:37
modding skills and win great prizes. Entries close February 7th, 2015. Click
0:42
now to learn more. To begin, we have to take a look at the heart of this card.
0:47
It's performance hardware. Galaxy sets you up with a stockbased clock speed of
0:51
the 20048 CUDA core equipped GM204 chip
0:55
of 1304 MHz and a boost clock speed of a whopping 1418 MHz, which is an
1:01
impressive 202 MHz over the reference 980. The card's standard setup of 4 GB
1:07
of 256 gigabit GDR5 memory is nudged up
1:11
a little bit, understandably much less exciting, 10 MHz, resulting in an
1:15
effective 7,10 MHz compared to the reference card's 7,000 MHz. The job of
1:21
cooling all this performance is given to two 80mm fans and one 90 mm fan on top
1:27
of a seven nickelplated heatpipe aluminum fin array. Three of the heat
1:31
pipes are 6 millimeter and four of them are 8mm girth showoffs. Hiding away back
1:36
here is also uh a integrated MOSFET heat
1:40
sink that Galaxy put in as well. And last but not least, there is an
1:43
absolutely beautiful anodized aluminum back plate, which admittedly doesn't do
1:48
a whole lot for performance, but really ties the whole card together
1:51
aesthetically and does offer structural support to help the card not bend under
1:56
the weight of that heat sink. This cooling setup kept the card at a
1:59
relatively cool 73°ish while overclocked and under heavy
2:04
load on our open test bench, and we don't have an acoustic chamber, but I
2:08
also wouldn't say that it was unnecessarily loud, even in our most
2:11
stressful tests. Now, I'm going to take a moment before moving on to essentially
2:15
buy some time while you guys get a look at this card and appreciate what Galax
2:20
has done here aesthetically. again with the latest additions of their Hall of
2:24
Fame series. There's lots of sweet tech inside, including classics like SLI,
2:30
CUDA, GeForce Experience, and all the new stuff that was introduced with GTX
2:34
980, like MFAA, dynamic super resolution, and delta color compression,
2:39
which you can learn more about in Lionus's original 980 launch video by
2:43
clicking it. Now, back to the aesthetic. The only drawback I see here is the
2:48
slightly beige color of the otherwise great dual 8pin power connectors that
2:52
lead to the buff eight-phase power design with eight phases for GPU and two
2:58
for memory. Moving on, the Galax 980 sticks with reference IO configuration
3:03
with three full-size display ports, one HDMI, and lastly one DVI port. And also
3:08
back here, you may notice the at first seemingly random button near the IO.
3:13
While it isn't labeled, and I couldn't easily find anything about it in their
3:16
manual, as they use a reference card for their examples, I was able to eventually
3:22
identify it as the hyperboost button, which essentially increases fan speed
3:27
and maximum power delivered to the GPU just by pressing it in. If you've
3:31
decided that you just have far too many famous things and you simply need
3:36
multiple halls of fame in your computer, the SLI fingers at the top of the card
3:40
will happily accommodate two, three, or even four GPUs all linked together.
3:44
Also, at the top of the card, there is a large backlit hall of fame logo whose
3:48
brightness and lighting pattern can be controlled through software. And
3:52
finally, we have one last little switch on the far end of the card, which is,
3:56
you guessed it, a dual BIOS switch, which should enable you to try out new
4:00
firmware updates and customize things relatively risk-f free. As we have done
4:05
a whack ton of general overview style reviews on the GTX 980 already, I
4:10
decided to go with a slightly different route for the benchmarking on this one
4:13
and went for a 4K gaming shootout between our EVGA classified 980, our
4:18
Galax Hall of Fame 980, and our Sapphire Vapor X290X 8 GB cards. Overclocking was
4:25
simple enough. Thanks to this card coming with such an aggressive stock
4:28
clock, you won't actually have to push it all that hard to get a very
4:32
respectable overclock. My personal settings were max core voltage and power
4:37
limit combined with a core clock increase of 90 MHz and a memory clock
4:42
increase of 300 MHz which resulted in an effective in-game core clock speed of
4:48
1533 MHz. While this isn't quite as high
4:51
as our EVGA classified 980s overclock of 1570 MHz, it is important to remember
4:56
that some of this could easily be attributed to the silicon lottery
5:00
because not all chips are created equal. As with all of our GPU reviews, we're
5:04
using our standard test bench, the specs of which you can see on the screen
5:08
you're looking at right now. And all of the graphics cards used for this test
5:12
are overclocked and you can find them and all of my settings for them linked
5:16
in the description down below as long as Nick gets his crap together and includes
5:20
a link for a change. Otherwise, you can find them on the forum. With the fun
5:24
performance stuff out of the way, let's get to the only question left, which is
5:27
what's in the box. The answer may shock you. a quick installation guide, a
5:32
user's manual, two eightpin PCI power adapters, one DVI to VGA converter, and
5:36
finally, clearly the most important inclusion is a do not disturb door
5:40
doornob hanger. All right, guys, speaking of aesthetically beautiful
5:44
things, today's sponsor is Squarespace.
5:47
And if you want to run a website without setting up your own hosting and whatnot,
5:50
you should definitely check them out. They have a new interface which
5:53
integrates Google apps, allows you to trick your web page out with some Getty
5:58
images, and has a ton of templates and cover pages for you to choose from.
6:03
Their big focus is beautiful design with a simple and powerful backend for users
6:07
of all skill levels. And if you ever run into any issues while using Squarespace,
6:12
they have 247 tech support via live chat
6:15
and email. Their service is available for $8 a month and includes a free
6:20
domain when you purchase for a year of service. You can even start building
6:24
your website with their free trial. No credit card required. And when you
6:28
decide to purchase a membership through Squarespace, you can save 10% off your
6:32
first purchase by using offer code Lionus. So check them out in the link in
6:36
the description. All right, guys. In the comments down below, do you want Lionus to make a fast as possible episode on
6:41
what the heck the Silicon Lottery is? Let me know. While you're down there,
6:44
like, dislike, favorite, share, subscribe if you haven't already, all of
6:48
those things. If you want to jump off of YouTube because you want some other
6:52
website, go to linesttips.com. That's the form. If you don't like the ads, you
6:55
can become a contributor. Get rid of all those. You can comment on the thread under Linus' ramblings for this video,
7:00
and I'm probably more likely to see your comment there. Also, if you want a shirt
7:04
that isn't this one, check out the link in the description below the video
7:07
because you obviously went back to YouTube for whatever reason. Anyways,
7:11
guys, thanks for watching. and I'll see you next time.