EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified Video Card Review

Overclocking is a big part of the enthusiast community so we tend to look for special products designed to help us reach our goals without having to resort to extensive board modifications.  The EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified is clearly a video card designed for hardware enthusiasts looking to get the most from their system and delivers on that promise.

When comparing the 980 Ti Classified to the other EVGA video cards you may wonder exactly what the difference is and why you would purchase one card over another.  The answer is in the hardware.  SuperClocked edition cards are factory overclocked and deliver amazing performance but are designed for gamers who may never tweak anything beyond the factory settings.  These reference cards also come with arbitrary limits that the 980 Ti Classified is designed to surpass.  This is one reason why it comes with dual BIOS chips, a 14-phase VRM and larger ACX cooling solution.

During our testing the card ran extremely well and posted some impressive benchmark scores.  From a hardware standpoint the GTX 980 Ti is using a cut down version of the TitanX GPU which is designed to be both a power efficient and powerful.  The larger GPU brings with it higher performance at the cost of additional heat and slightly lower clocks.  As we showed in this review the EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified can easily run near the 1500Mhz mark and will typically Boost up to 1400Mhz with nothing more than a well ventilated case.

What really impressed us was the level of overclocking performance we got from simply adjusting clock frequencies using EVGA PrecisionX.  The average OC using the included BIOS was around 1485Mhz core and 1978Mhz mem.  Neither clock required any voltage changes and worked under the default fan profile.  Sadly our GPU didn’t scale with voltage but we are hopeful for around 1800Mhz+ under LN2.

Low Power Consumption
Large 14+3-phase PWM
Backplate Included
Great Looking ACX 2.0 Cooler
GPU Boost 2.0
Quiet Operation
Dual BIOS
Extensive Voltage Control
Community Support

Test leads not included
Disabled fans can impact game performance due to changes in boost.