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Closer Look
So, now that the introduction has been dealt with, let us take a look at what we are getting from EVGA.
The card comes in a relatively small box. It’s a pretty laid back box with no dragons or space fighters or other weird stuff that we tend to see these days on some boxes and as you flip it over you get a good sense of what the card can offer.
EVGA doesn’t go overboard with accessories. We get a DVI => VGA adapter and two kinds of PCI-Express power-adapters. EVGA also includes a metal case badge (who uses those these days?), two large stickers and a huge “movie” poster. Documentation comes in the form of a thick manual in tons of language. No CD/DVD with drivers or overclocking software is included and has to be downloaded.
In contrast to the dual-fan setup of the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ this card uses the reference design that we have seen for a few generations from Nvidia. A single fan handles the cooling and ejects the warm air at the front. While reference coolers used to be pretty bad this is a cooler that has worked well.
The card needs power from a 6-pin and a 8-pin-power connector.
The card comes with 5 connectors:
- 1x DVI-I
- 3x DP
- 1x HDMI
All connectors come with a plastic cover protecting them when you do not use them. The card can handle up to 4 displays at the same time.
It’s always a trip to look back at hardware reviews from the era of the GTX 980 Ti—that card was such a beast for 1440p and 4K back in the day. Seeing the mention of the test rig getting a bit old reminds me of the classic struggle we’ve all faced: wondering if the CPU is finally becoming a bottleneck for the GPU.
I’m currently running a setup centered around a 10-core Xeon at 2.7GHz https://serverorbit.com/cpus-and-processors/xeon-10-core/2-7ghz. While it’s definitely not a gaming-first chip, it’s been incredibly consistent for my workstation tasks. It’s funny how, even years later, I still find myself checking if I’m “CPU-bound” during heavy multitasking, much like the author was doing with their 3930K back then. It’s a timeless concern, regardless of whether you’re chasing frame rates or render times.
Do you think we’ve reached a point where the “baseline system” is finally powerful enough that the average user doesn’t need to worry about CPU bottlenecks for at least 5 to 7 years, or is software always going to find a way to demand more?