Product Showcase
Product Showcase: GeForce GTX 980
Let's start with our photo-shoot. Two pages worth of photos then and all of them from our own photo-shoot.
Above, the crackalaking dude in disguise, yes it is a GeForce GTX 980 man! The model that GALAX offers specifically comes with a faster standard clock frequency. The mateys over at GALAX have built a custom board that diverts from the reference design in pretty much every way. New for this SOC edition is the black design and somewhat red fan coloring. Looking good there brotha!
The card has a familiar size at roughly 28-29 cm in length with the cooler included, the PCB itself is a little short. This card has higher factory clocks, the GPU core base clock is ticking, tocking and tacking away at a 1228 MHz GPU core clock frequency with a very fast 1329 MHz Boost frequency. The memory is clocked at 7010 MHz / 7.0 GHz (effective data-rate) on its 256-bit wide memory bus of 4 GB GDDR5 memory.
It's a sturdy looking fellah alright, three fans span almost 8cm each and have cooling capacity alright. The card itself is not the most quiet compared to others we tested. Fans will spin at idle, and under gaming load you can hear a little airflow. It's all good and not at all noisy though. On top you can see a Custom name plate has changeable design for modding.
The card will have a maximum power design of 165 Watts, but due to the higher clocks and extensive tweaking please allow for 20, maybe 25 extra Watts, these boards have been designed with overclocking in mind. Its power phases are fed from two 8-pin power headers. In combo with component selection it should be plenty for a nice tweak (or two).
GALAX also applies a nice backplate. There are two main reasons for a backplate:
- It prevents the larger cards from bending due to weight.
- It's aesthetically more pleasing.
Backplates can trap heat and heat up the PCB & components, this is why you want a backplate with at least a little space in-between the PCB and plate or a backplate with gaps on the most prominent locations like GPU and VRM area. Most designs these days have that. In that case it can work a little like a heatsink, add sturdiness and make a nice looking product.
So, properly done then with some ventilation they can be helpful. GALAX did it right, there is space inbetween the PCB and plate + you can see many vent holes. So that looks like a proper implementation.
The card will get a luxurious five display connectors, You'll spot three Display Port connectors, one HDMI 2.0 connector and one DVI connector. HDMI is 2.0 compatible meaning that compatible monitors and tellys can do UHD at 60 Hz, DP is 1.2 but has support for eDP 1.4.
