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Conclusion
Even with the AMD Fury X now out in the open (and performing similar to the non-overclocked GTX 980 Ti) the Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 Ti generally and the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked specifically still is a kick-ass GPU/card. Yes, this is an expensive card but just look at those performance scores. If you plan on gaming at 2560×1440 or 4K then the GTX 980 Ti is an excellent choice. It completely trounces the GTX 980 at the higher resolutions which means that if you have an even older card is offers a huge performance increase and future proofing. On the feature-side the card also comes with a lot of nice features including G-Sync-support and HDMI 2.0 (something that users with new 4K-TV’s might appreciate).
As for the actual card there are few things to complain about. This is a reference card design meaning you won’t get the dual fans and we had a bit less luck in overclocking than with the eVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ but the reference cooler also is a bit better in venting air from the case than the ACSX 2.0+ cooler although on the flip side we see much lower temps with the ACSX 2.0+-cooler. So the main flaw is the fact that eVGA is offering a bunch of cards around the same price point with slightly different feature set (reference cooler or own cooler, backplate or no backplate, hybrid water-cooling, fan or water cooling block, Superclocked or regular clocked … puh).
So with the caveat that one of the other eVGA-cards might fit you better we still will give our full approval of this card because quit frankly even with th competition of the AMD Fury X, this still is one of the best video cards money can buy when weighing in value and features.
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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?