Hardware Award
EVGA GTX 980
K|NGPIN ACX 2.0+
RRP: $799.99 | Website: www.evga.com
Test Machine
• INTEL Core i7 5960X
• CORSAIR Dominator
Platinum DDR4 3400 C16
• GIGABYTE X99 SOCChampion
• SAMSUNG PX941 512GB
• CORSAIR AX1500i
• Windows 8.1 x64
I
t doesn’t seem that long
ago, that the EVGA GeForce
GTX 780Ti K|NGPIN Edition
made its way unto these
pages. At the time it was
the undisputed GTX 780Ti,
holding at least all modern
GPU overclocking World
Records at any one time or
another. Where 780Ti GPUs
were concerned, there were
competitors but none of them
managed to displace the EVGA
card. Not surprising however
in part, because as is the case
with the specialist cards, they
arrive towards the end of the
life cycle of the GPU. With the
GTX 980 is it no different, as
this car, even though available
34 The OverClocker Issue 34 | 2015
initially several months ago.
Has only seen what would be
considered mass availability
(at least in the regions where
EVGA has retailers) recently.
That doesn’t mean however,
that it is not worth your time
and money. As it just may
be the best GTX 980 on the
market and if not, it certainly
is the fastest on paper.
There’s a conundrum
of sorts with this card. In
isolation or without the
existence of the CLASSIFED
featured in the issue 32. The
K|NGP|N iteration of the 980
is as good as you’re going
to get out of any GTX 980.
Electrically, plenty has been
done to ensure that it is not
only built from the best mass
producible components, but
the signal tracing and layout
has been optimized to enable
only the best clocks under
extreme conditions.
There is no reason to doubt
this because time and time
again this line of cards have
produced the goods (Classified
of which this product is part).
This family of cards are almost
always representative of the
best clocks that a particular
NVIDIA GPU is capable of under
extreme circumstances. The
K|NGP|N cards only top that
off with that little bit extra
to take the GPUs that extra
mile. In regards to the GTX
980 this isn’t so obvious and
here in lies the tragedy* (If you
can call anything PC related
a tragedy). The overclocking
on these cores is almost
exclusively dependent on a
luck of the draw, silicon lottery.
Once a GPU reaches those
frequencies beyond 2000MHz,
there’s little to nothing more
that can be done to take it
further, regardless of how
great the workmanship. If
one looks only at the clock
speeds to determine how well
designed a particular GPU is,
then a misrepresentation of the
graphics card is sure to follow.