Conclusion
Conclusion
Now that we’ve come to the end of this review, it is becoming increasingly apparent how the GTX 980 Ti’s offerings have evolved. Cards from EVGA, MSI, Zotac and now ASUS have made their way through our labs and while there weren’t any nasty surprises, some cards have stood out a bit more than others. The GTX 980 Ti STRIX OC is one of those; it is simply a cut above.
While it may be easy to rag all day on the currently dismal state of availability for ASUS’ wunderkind or the fact that it was launched long after its competitors, the STRIX OC still deserves a place among the best graphics cards currently available. It is fast, quiet, relatively compact, offers one of the best software suites around and is built with extremely high level components. This is a weapons-grade product, one that will fulfill your gaming needs for years to come.
Raw performance is often the primary selling point of these high end cards and the STRIX OC has that in spades. Before this review, Zotac’s GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme was considered the fastest single core card to ever grace our test bench but that reign came to an end here. Despite paper specification inferiority the STRIX actually managed to just eke out ahead of the Zotac card due to higher sustained clock speeds throughout our tests. That brought it to a point that was a staggering 16% ahead of a reference GTX 980 Ti and 14% faster than NVIDIA’s own TITAN X.
The way ASUS achieved these numbers is particularly impressive. The AMP! Extreme required a gargantuan cooler that was relatively quiet while the new DirectCU III heatsink offered lower temperatures, near-silent acoustics and enough thermal headroom for higher Boost speeds. It’s the perfect combination of everything an enthusiast could want in a graphics card.
Overclocking our card resulted in frequencies that were directly in line with other GTX 980 Ti’s we’ve looked at in the past; in other words final clock speeds hovered just south of the 1.5GHz mark but had difficulty breaking through that barrier. That seems par for the course these days and we don’t expect that to change unless you are running an unlocked BIOS. However, we can say that ASUS’ new GPU Tweak II is one of the better software overclocking tools around.
Perhaps the real star of this particular show is the GTX 980 Ti STRIX OC’s price. At $670USD it happens to be priced right in line with EVGA’s baseline Superclocked model but offers significantly better specifications and a slightly more advanced heatsink design.
But is there anything here that could be taken negatively? Yes, there is. First and foremost, despite the card boasting three preset performance and fan speed modes, acoustics remained identical regardless of the chosen setting within GPU Tweak. Granted, there was a slight difference in how long it took the fans to reach their RPM plateau but every preset ultimately settled on the same temperature and fan speeds. In addition to that, it seems like ASUS has been encountering some difficulty in keeping the channels stocked since actually finding a GTX 980 Ti STRIX OC to buy quickly becomes a lesson in futility.
When taking into account price, performance and all other aspects that determine what makes a graphics card great, ASUS has something special here. Their GTX 980 Ti STRIX OC is the complete package and certainly warrants your attention….provided you can actually find one.
