The GeForce GTX 980 is the

new king of the hill among single-GPU graphics cards, and with nifty features like DSR, it looks like an awfully tempting potential purchase.

If you’re feeling this particular temptation, there’s probably one question on your mind: which one should I get?

The first GTX 980 cards to hit the market were based on Nvidia’s reference design, with that familiar aluminum cooling shroud and blower. Demand for these cards is high, and supplies are tight. Now, however, a number of custom-designed GTX 980 cards are becoming available. Not only are they potentially more abundant, but they also promise various upgrades over the reference cards. Are they worthy of your attention? We’ve spent some time with a couple of slick offerings from Gigabyte and Zotac in order to find out.

Zotac’s GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omega

Pictured above is the GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omega from the folks at Zotac. This hulking creation looks like some sort of heavy mechanized military unit. Here’s how it compares to the GTX 980 reference card:

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) GDDR5

transfer rate Aux power ports Length Intro price Reference

GeForce GTX

980 1126 1216 7 GT/s 2 x 6-pin 10.5″ $549 Zotac

GTX

980 AMP! Omega 1203 1304 7 GT/s 2 x 8-pin 10.75″ $579

The Omega is bigger and beefier than the vanilla GTX 980 reference design in almost every way. Its GPU clocks are higher, it takes in more juice via dual eight-pin aux power inputs, and its price is pumped up by 30 bucks, too. About the only thing that’s the same is its 4GB of GDDR5 memory, which is clocked at 7 GT/s, just like stock.

The most notable way that the Omega differs from the reference card, though, has gotta be its massive cooler. Zotac has a happy tradition of choosing exotic coolers for its aftermarket board designs, and this one fits the mold—or breaks it, I suppose, if the mold is conventionally sized. This thing will occupy three slots in the host PC and is 10.75″ long. Beyond that, it sticks up past the top of the PCIe slot cover by about 1.25″, enough that it could present clearance issues in older or smaller cases.

The oversized cooling shroud covers a pair of densely populated banks of heatsink fins fed by quad heatpipes. The twin cooling fans are positioned directly above those banks. That’s an awful lot of metal and gas to situate atop a GPU with a 165W power envelope (although I doubt the Omega really honors that limitation).

Despite the obvious excess, the Omega retains something of a stately look, at least around front. There aren’t any illuminated logos or other such bling. The only LEDs present are basic power indicators on the back of the card.

Also around back is one of the Omega’s most intriguing features: a USB port labeled “OC+”. Zotac includes a cable to plug into this port and into an internal nine-pin USB header on the host PC’s motherboard. Via this connection, the OC+ feature monitors some key variables, including the 12V line from the PCIe slot, the 12V line from the PCIe power connectors, GPU current draw, and memory voltage. Beyond monitoring, OC+ also allows control over the card’s memory voltage.

Although Nvidia already has built-in hooks for monitoring and tweaking various aspects of the GPU’s operation, OC+ makes an end-run around all of it. This monitoring capability is external to the GPU and relies on a separate chip and shunt resistors. Based on the device IDs shown in Device Manager, Zotac has apparently incorporated a Texas Instruments MSP430 USB microcontroller onto the board to drive OC+.

Eager to try out the OC+ monitoring capability, I connected the USB cable to my motherboard’s header, installed Zotac’s FireStorm tweaking utility from the included DVD, and was confronted with the interface you see above.

At this point, my feeble brain became confused. Pressing the “advance” button in the interface brought up the series of sliders you see above, but all of those options are available with pretty much any Maxwell or Kepler tweaking utility. The only monitoring I could find consisted of those two small graphs on the top left showing the GPU core and memory clocks. Most of the other buttons like “setting” and “info” proved fruitless. The “Quick Boost” icon was self-explanatory—likely a modest pre-baked overclocking profile—and I figured “Gamer” was probably a slightly more aggressive version of the same. OC+ was nowhere to be found.

Worse, neither Zotac’s website nor the included documentation offered any explanation of what OC+ actually does (beyond the words “OC Plus real-time performance intelligence . . . takes your graphics experience to the next level”) or how to access it. Hrm.

After consulting with Zotac’s friendly PR types, I was encouraged to press the “Gamer” button. Lo and behold, clicking “Gamer” brought up a new window called “S.S.P Chip Setting.” There’s no mention of OC+ anywhere, but the right info is present.

Once you find the right spot, OC+ does indeed tell you things you can’t know via Nvidia’s usual GPU monitoring hooks.

Oddly enough, though, the Omega doesn’t expose much control over those variables. The GPU Vcore setting appears to allow the user to raise the card’s peak GPU voltage by 0.02V, to 1.21V, but it’s fussy. The FireStorm app doesn’t always keep up with the GPU’s dynamic behavior under load, so you’re not always adjusting the present voltage properly. Causing a system crash with this slider is way too easy.

The memory voltage slider has two settings, “no change” and a +20 mV offset. That’s it.

My understanding is that you may have to pony up for Zotac’s GTX 980 AMP! Extreme edition, priced at $609, in order to get working voltage control.

The OC+ limitations chafe a bit, but the worst of it came when I tried to tweak the Omega using the regular controls in the “settings” window, like one would with any recent GeForce card. You can adjust the sliders to your heart’s content, but near as I can tell, none of them do anything at all. The Omega’s GPU clocks and memory speeds simply don’t change when you press “Apply.”

For the purposes of this review, I was able to overclock the Omega somewhat using a much older version of FireStorm that I grabbed from Zotac’s website. (The new version hasn’t yet been posted online.) This older utility has a simpler and frankly more logical interface, and it works reasonably well. That said, nothing I did in software allowed me to raise the Omega’s GPU voltage. That variable is evidently locked on this card—a curious choice by Zotac since even the reference design cards aren’t voltage-locked.

Gigabyte’s G1 Gaming GTX 980

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) GDDR5

transfer rate Aux power ports Length Intro price Reference

GeForce GTX

980 1126 1216 7 GT/s 2 x 6-pin 10.5″ $549 Gigabyte

G1 Gaming GTX

980 1228 1329 7 GT/s 2 x 8-pin 11.75″ $629

The G1 Gaming GTX 980’s default clock speeds are about 20MHz higher than the Omega’s, and the card has a steeper price of entry of $629. Other than its clock speeds, the G1 Gaming has some virtues that might help justify that premium.

Virtue number one is that sexy-looking Windforce cooler with three separate fans. I swear, GPU cooling fans have entered the same territory occupied by disposable razor blade counts. Regardless, the G1 Gaming wears this look well.

That third fan may have contributed to Gigabyte’s main achievement here, which is fitting a tremendous amount of cooling power into a dual-slot width with a low profile. Gigabyte claims this Windforce 3X cooler is good for dissipating up to 600W. That’s bonkers. The only dimension in which the G1 Gaming is larger than Nvidia’s reference cooler is length, where it has an additional 1.25″. This is one of the longest video cards you’ll find, so I’d advise you to measure your case before ordering one.

Assuming it fits, the G1 Gaming should offer plenty of cooling capacity. The twin heatsinks beneath its cooling fans are pierced by five copper heatpipes each, and there’s barely a cubic millimeter of wasted space beneath that flat-black shroud. The G1 Gaming is dense and feels heavier in the hand than the Omega.

Gigabyte hasn’t neglected the bling factor, either. That Windforce cooler lights up like my two-year-old’s face when he’s destroying something expensive. The bright blue color is hard to capture entirely on camera. Despite what you see above, the LEDs give off a pretty intense shade of medium blue in person. Whether or not that color will match your PC’s chosen aesthetic is iffy, but it’s certainly distinctive.

The Gigabyte card carries its nifty aesthetic around back, where a metal shroud offers protection from accidental damage.

The G1 Gaming’s other distinctive virtue is indicated by the presence of a sixth video output, a DVI-D port. The card can support a total of four displays at once, but using a feature Gigabyte calls Flex Display technology, it auto-detects any connected displays and enables the appropriate combination of outputs.

I haven’t had a chance to connect four or five monitors in order to try every combination, but crucially, Gigabyte’s website indicates the G1 Gaming can drive two DVI displays combined with one DP and one HDMI simultaneously. With only a single DVI-I port, most GTX 980 cards can’t do that. If you have a couple of decent but older DVI-only monitors on hand, the G1 Gaming may be your best bet.

I’ll admit I was initially skeptical, but after using it, I’m impressed. Gigabyte’s OC Guru II tweaking utility has a clean, logical layout that exposes each of the key variables you might want to tweak in order to overclock at GTX 980. The only red mark on its record is the resolution indicator that says my display is running at a “60 MHz” refresh rate. If only!

Click the “more” button, and OC Guru pops open a monitoring window like the one above. Again, it hits all of the right notes. Although the info presented there isn’t a verbose as what you might see in EVGA’s Precision app or MSI’s Afterburner, the main variables you need for overclocking are present—and their values are plotted over time.

OC Guru even offers the ability to define a custom fan speed profile. Given how deadly effective the cooler on this card can be, I could see myself creating a less aggressive fan speed curve at some point. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look briefly at performance, and then we’ll see how effective the cooler is.

Performance

We’re not going to spend a ton of time obsessing over how much an additional 100MHz or so will affect the performance of a GM204 GPU. We can get a quick assessment of the performance differences between these cards by using the built-in benchmark from Thief, which spits out a simple FPS average. If you want the full-on inside-the-second performance treatment, please go read my initial GeForce GTX 980 review. By the way, our test system config for this article was the same as the one we used for that review.

Out of the box, both of these cards offer a 5-10% performance increase over a stock-clocked GTX 980, depending on the scenario. The G1 Gaming is a bit faster than the Zotac AMP! Omega, thanks to its ~20MHz advantage in base and boost clock frequencies.

Power consumption

Please note that our “under load” tests aren’t conducted in an absolute peak scenario. Instead, we have the cards running a real game, Crysis 3, in order to show us power draw with a more typical workload.

To get higher clock speeds and performance, these aftermarket cards require about 10% more power under load than a reference GTX 980. They’re still quite power efficient overall compared to cards like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and the Radeon R9 290X.

Noise levels and GPU temperatures

I wouldn’t make too much of the results above since we’re flirting with the noise floor in Damage Labs when taking these readings. Still, the meter is not wrong; these two cards are exceptionally quiet at idle. They should be essentially inaudible in a normal home environment.

When the GPU is running a game, Zotac’s magnificently enormous cooler is among the quietest we’ve tested. The reference GTX 980’s blower isn’t bad, either, in part because it just doesn’t have all that much heat to dissipate.

The G1 Gaming isn’t noisy by any stretch, but it is one of the louder coolers in this group. Thing is, this is a pretty quiet group. Note that our Radeon R9 290X is an XFX card with a big aftermarket cooler. The R9 290, which has AMD’s reference blower, illustrates how much louder video card coolers can be.

There’s a reason the G1 Gaming’s cooler makes a little more noise than most. It’s keeping the GTX 980 GPU 13°C cooler than the Zotac Omega does—and 19°C cooler than the reference card. In fact, the reference GTX 980 butts up against its pre-defined temperature limit of 80°C and may be slowing down in order to avoid exceeding it. This result is why I said I might define a custom fan profile for the G1 Gaming. Gigabyte has clearly built in a ton of thermal headroom out of the box, more than is necessary unless you’re overclocking the card.

Speaking of which…

Overclocking

Overclocking Nvidia’s recent GPUs can be a complex affair. GPU clock speeds are controlled from moment to moment by Nvidia’s GPU Boost algorithm. A number of different variables can become the key factor that limits GPU clocks, including temperatures, GPU current draw, voltage, and base and boost clock speeds. Meanwhile, clock frequencies change dynamically in response to the present workload. Squeezing the most out of a GeForce card means monitoring all of these inputs and making sure they’re in range—all while testing for stability.

Fortunately, getting a little more out of one of these aftermarket cards doesn’t have to be too difficult. For example, Gigabyte’s choice of an aggressive cooling policy ensures GPU temperatures will almost never be the limiting factor in overclocking the G1 Gaming. You can pretty much forget about that variable. Also, Nvidia has dictated some power and voltage limits that will probably prevent you from ruining your shiny new GPU. With good cooling on tap, like both of these cards have, you can pretty much move the voltage and power limit sliders to the max without much risk—at least, that’s my sense of things. Just don’t sue me if you somehow release the magic smoke from your new GTX 980.

That said, my sense is that GTX 980 clock speeds are largely gated by voltage. My approach to overclocking was to max out the power and voltage sliders for each card, set the temperature target to 80°C, and ensure good cooling. From there, I raised GPU and memory clocks while running MSI’s Kombustor GPU burn-in utility and checking for three things:

Stability — Does it crash?

Visual artifacts — Do Kombustor’s images render correctly?

Delivered speeds — Does turning up the slider actually mean increased clock frequencies?

Since voltage is a major part of the equation and some overclocking utilities only expose voltage as an offset (for instance, +0.087V above stock), I had to establish a baseline for each card by monitoring it under load. Here’s where each one started.

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) Memory clock (MHz) Kombustor GPU voltage Kombustor GPU clock (MHz) Reference

GeForce GTX

980 1126 1216 7010 1.118 1177 Zotac

GTX

980 AMP! Omega 1203 – 7044 1.212 1328 Gigabyte

G1 Gaming GTX

980 1228 1329 7010 1.250 1367

The aftermarket cards are overvolted out of the gate compared to the reference board. Here are the best speeds at the highest voltages I was able to coax out of each card.

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) Memory clock (MHz) Kombustor GPU voltage Kombustor GPU clock (MHz) Reference

GeForce GTX

980 OC 1337 1426 7960 1.243 1475 Zotac

GTX

980 AMP! Omega OC 1352 – 8000 1.212 1478 Gigabyte

G1 Gaming GTX

980 OC 1368 1469 8010 1.250 1520

Although both aftermarket cards have voltage sliders exposed in software, tweaking them didn’t actually raise the max voltage we observed under load. (The G1 Gaming’s minimum voltage slider does work, at least.) I can kind of forgive that fact in the case of the G1 Gaming, but the Omega’s voltage is locked at a lower level than the reference board’s! Yikes.

Incidentally, I overclocked the reference card using OC Guru, which worked nicely. Unlike the aftermarket cards, the reference board’s fan policy required some tweaking in order to keep temperature overruns from limiting its clock speed. Using a manual fan policy in OC Guru solved this problem, but it came at the cost of increased blower noise. I probably could have tuned the fan curve manually for a more optimal combination of noise and cooling, but there’s no question the aftermarket coolers are quieter and more effective overall.

All three of the cards are happy with memory clocks at about 8 GT/s. Thanks to the highest GPU voltage and killer cooling, the G1 Gaming maintains the fastest GPU clocks under load.

Here’s how the three cards perform while overclocked.

There’s just not much daylight between the overclocked reference card and the two aftermarket offerings. The aftermarket cards do have better, more capable cooling hardware. They are quieter, and their GPUs never even approach the 80°C thermal limit. But they don’t offer much more performance potential than a vanilla GTX 980, at the end of the day.

Conclusions

The tale of the Zotac GTX 980 AMP! Omega is one of hardware and then everything else. Zotac has nailed the basic hardware formula on the Omega by slapping a hulking and potent triple-slot cooler on top of a GeForce GTX 980. The result is a product that’s both faster and quieter by default than a GTX 980 reference card. It’s hard to argue with that proposition.

As for everything else, well, that’s where things get shaky. Maybe it was just some quirk of my system, but I couldn’t get Zotac’s included FireStorm utility to modify the Omega’s clock speeds or other parameters at all. It just didn’t work. The OC+ monitoring feature is a nice idea, but the lack of documentation and poorly executed user interface dampen my enthusiasm for it. Why go to the trouble of adding this sort of custom hardware if you’re not going to develop the appropriate software and documentation to take advantage of it?

Then there’s the fact that the Omega doesn’t offer any more overclocking headroom than a reference GTX 980, despite the enormous cooler, the dual eight-pin power input requirement, and the giant “OC+” label on the side of the card. The trappings are there, but the Omega just doesn’t deliver on its apparent promise.

The Omega’s redeeming quality is a fairly modest price premium of 30 bucks over reference cards—and being in stock right now at Newegg. If you have the room in your system to accommodate this monster and the twin eight-pin power plugs to feed it, the Omega isn’t a bad choice. Just be aware that you’re paying more for two things—somewhat higher base clocks and a big, quiet cooler—and not much else.

On the other hand, I’m favorably impressed by Gigabyte’s G1 Gaming GTX 980 in spite of the fact that it costs $629 and doesn’t have tremendously more clock speed headroom than the reference design. Gigabyte made a bunch of smart decisions while designing this card and its associated software. In my book, it’s a cut above the Zotac—and the reference design. That sleek Windforce cooler looks great, works very well, and doesn’t intrude into a third slot. Gigabyte’s OC Guru software has a logical layout, decent monitoring, and makes GTX 980 overclocking relatively painless.

The G1 Gaming design team even nailed the little touches, like rotating the orientation of the aux power plugs by 180° to allow more room for the heatsink fins. The inclusion of two DVI outputs and Flex Display tech may justify the price premium all by itself, for the right user. And, you know, it has glowy lights.

Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980 October 2014

This isn’t entirely rational, but I simply like the G1 Gaming because it’s a slick, well-executed product. You may have to work with one yourself in order to understand, but I think this sort of attachment is what a premium bit of hardware is supposed to invite.

In the end, I think Gigabyte has done enough with the G1 Gaming to earn the distinction of a TR Recommended award. Prospective buyers should keep in mind that this card requires 11.75″ of lengthwise clearance inside of a case. Also, realize that this is very much a premium product. If you want sheer value, look to the GeForce GTX 970 instead. (Gigabyte even offers a G1 Gaming version of the 970.) That said, the G1 Gaming GTX 980 is one of the finest single-GPU video cards on the market. If that’s what you’re after, it will not disappoint.

Unfortunately, the G1 Gaming is out of stock at Amazon and not yet listed at Newegg as I write, so getting your hands on one may require some patience.

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