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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GM204 Review: Power and Efficiency

Author: Ryan Shrout
Manufacturer: NVIDIA

Overclocking, Power Consumption and Sound

As is usually the case with these launch articles, I don't get nearly the time that I would like to really go in-depth with overclocking. Still, even with limited time to do so, the results are kind of awesome. Kind of really awesome.

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For my testing, I am looking only at the GeForce GTX 980 4GB reference cards NVIDIA sent over. We'll spend more time with the retail cards in the next week or two. I used EVGA's new PrecisionX software to handle all the knobs and dials of overclocking with GPU Boost.

Right away you can see that the power target is able to go up to 125%! Considering we were limited to 109% in most cases with the GTX 780 Ti, this is a big change, and it is the result of NVIDIA's efficient power design.

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My GPU was 100% stable at a clock speed offset of 225 MHz, bringing our base clock speed to 1352 MHz and the Boost clock to 1441 MHz. Holy hell, let me wipe this sweat off my forehead. (Note: this also includes upping the voltage to the +0.87 mV maximum provided here.)

So what does that get us in performance? A quick run down in Metro: Last Light shows us.

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The black line represents our highest overclockable settings while remaining stable. The orange line, labeled with a 125 PT (power target) here, is here to show any gains from just increase the power target without changing a clock offset of any kind.

Our average frame rate in Metro at 2560x1440 jumps from about 57 FPS to 66 FPS, an increase of 17% or so from our overclocking.

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I know we are going to have questions about clock speed variance so I went ahead and addressed it with these few graphs. Here you are seeing the clock variance during our Metro: LL runs. The green line (all stock) shows there is some clock speed changes taking place, in line with what we expect GPU Boost to do, and how it has acted in the past. Nothing I have seen in my testing shows significant drops in clocks over time like we had with the initial wave of R9 290X/290 parts. 

The blue line (with power target set to 125%) shows that we are hitting a TDP limit on the GPU and by simply increasing the available power to the card (through that slider) we get a very flat, static clock rate. Of course that means there is room to go up...

And that is what the yellow line shows us. Even overclocked to a 225 MHz offset, the GTX 980 is able to maintain a very consistent clock pattern.

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To see those numbers in a different way, here are the average clock speeds over those runs. The stock GTX 980 hits an average clock speed of 1210 MHz, right at the advertised Boost clock. The GTX 980 with only the power target adjustment gets a lift to 1252 MHz. But the really impressive mark here is the yellow bar, showing an average frame rate of 1483 MHz in our overclocked settings; that is 30% higher clocks.

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All of this does come at a small price of course - noise from the fan on the GTX 980. This graph shows the ramp up on fan speed and I can tell you from testing that the overclocked card was noticeably louder, hitting nearly 44 dbA using my sound tester. That's about on par with the sound level of the original R9 290X cooler, so not great. But you are overclocked SIGNIFICANTLY here and stock noise levels of the GTX 980 hit only 36.7 dbA.

Power Consumption Testing

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Let's take a look at power consumption, one of the key tenets of the Maxwell architecture. Right away you can tell that something odd is going on - I just showed you a dozen or more pages of the GTX 980 beating the GTX 780 Ti as well as the R9 290X by slim to moderate margins. Yet here I am showing you power consumption that is not just a little lower, but significantly lower than the competition. The GTX 980 draws 131 watts less than the R9 290X and 86 watts less than the GTX 780 Ti. 

That is not a small number - with the 165W TDP on the GTX 980, the R9 290X uses nearly an entire extra GTX 980 worth of power.

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The GTX 970 shows similar results. It uses 80 watts less power than the Radeon R9 290 and 54 watts less power than the GTX 780. Heck, it even uses 34 watts less power than the Radeon R9 280X that doesn't even come close to it in performance. 

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And, as expected, these results look even better for NVIDIA when we go into multiple cards. In fact, the GTX 980 SLI configuration uses about 30 watts LESS power than a single R9 290X going full bore. 

Sound Level Testing

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When I first tested the GTX 780 Ti, I knew it was a louder card that NVIDIA would like to make. Here you can see that the new GTX 980 with a reference cooler is able stay at a much lower noise level than the GTX 780 Ti. The Radeon R9 290X number we are showing here is NOT from an original reference card but instead an ASUS DirectCU II after market design, thus it shines incredibly well in our noise testing comparison. 

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The same is true for the GTX 970 - though we will dive more into with our retail card reviews soon!

September 18, 2014 | 10:46 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

GTX 970 for me! Been waiting for this card. Great review

September 18, 2014 | 10:48 PM - Posted by Robogeoff (not verified)

Very nice Ryan. It's good to see that someone took the time to do SLI benches and framerate pacing.

September 18, 2014 | 11:23 PM - Posted by Ryan Shrout

Thanks its been a pain in the ass and we are still writing stuff up as the article went live. :)

September 25, 2014 | 03:29 AM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

I know, the process you gotta go through to get those FCAT results is a pain, but I must say this puts your reviews and this website well above all others, true enthusiasts will understand and I am now sold.

September 18, 2014 | 10:50 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Sooo. when is 980/1080/1800 or whatever TI coming out? I need performance more than power efficiency.

September 19, 2014 | 09:53 AM - Posted by funandjam

I'm guessing that a TI version will be pulled out sometime after AMD's new lineup, that is if their new lineup has a flagship that outperforms the 980.

September 19, 2014 | 11:06 AM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Probably 6 months from now. AMD's next-gen is supposed to drop in Q1 2015 so we'll see how much they push things forward.

Nvidia didn't exert much energy (no pun intended) to beat the 18 month old performance of the 700 Series cards so AMD is in a good spot.

September 19, 2014 | 08:33 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Where AMD will have problems, not so much in pricing, but in the thermals that are required for the mini/micro sized systems for HTPC/Etc. that may not be able to take the AMD SKUs even if the prices are lower, getting as much GPU power into as small a form factor as possible is going to be a much more important market segment, as more of these products are being introduced.

Small portable form factor portable mini desktop systems, linked wirelessly to tablets, and relying on the mini desktop for most of the processing needs, are going to appear, systems that can be easily carried around in a laptop bag, along with a tablet, the tablet acting as the desktop host for direct(Via ad hoc WiFi) remote into the mini desktop PC. these type of systems will be more powerful than a laptop(the Mini PC part of the pair), but just as portable, and plugged in at the coffee houses/ETC. and wirelessly serving games, and compute to one, or more tablets. Fitting More powerful discrete GPUs into these systems that will not overburden the limited cooling available in the Mini/Micro form factor will be a big business, especially for gaming/game streaming on the go, and taking these devices along while traveling, and having a device that can be configured to be more like a laptop when on battery power, but ramp up the power beyond what a laptop is capable of while plugged in.

September 19, 2014 | 08:38 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Edit: the tablet acting as the desktop host for direct(Via ad hoc WiFi) remote into the mini desktop PC

to: Edit: the mini PC acting as the desktop/gaming/compute host for direct(Via ad hoc WiFi) remote from the tablet

Got it backwards!

September 18, 2014 | 10:53 PM - Posted by Holyneo (not verified)

I'm so glad I resisted the urge to not spend 3k on a Titan Z.

September 18, 2014 | 11:46 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

So you bought a Titan Z?

September 19, 2014 | 07:12 AM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

you wild be an idiot to spend 3k on titan z when you could get 2 titan blacks for 2k

September 19, 2014 | 07:41 AM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Pretty sure he was being sarcastic.

September 18, 2014 | 11:00 PM - Posted by anon (not verified)

cant help but notice the 770 has no numbers up. Are those coming still..?

September 18, 2014 | 11:22 PM - Posted by Ryan Shrout

Didn't really have room for that in my graphs this time around, but I'll consider for the retail card releases for sure. You can estimate how much slower the GTX 770/GTX 680 would be by compare it to the GTX 780.

September 18, 2014 | 11:07 PM - Posted by Chaitanya Shukla

If nvidia has managed to drop power requirement so much on current 28nm process, I am eagre to see what they will manage to do next year when 20nm process will start. Die shrink is going to make Amd engineers rethink on thier gpu pricing and architecture.

September 18, 2014 | 11:23 PM - Posted by Ryan Shrout

It's an interesting thought - though all indications are right now that the 20nm process isn't setup to get higher performance.

September 18, 2014 | 11:57 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

It's nice to see them get the performance gains from the 28nm node with some architectural tweaks, that means they will get even more from a process node shrink, whenever the fabs get the 20nm process set up for higher performance. This year and next should see some solid gains, and hopefully less rebranding, as a new round of the AMD verses Nvidia contest begins anew.

September 19, 2014 | 04:38 PM - Posted by aparsh335i (not verified)

Here is what i think is wild -
The 980 seems to be incredibly "dumbed down" from where it could be if they wanted to max out. They've done this before though, right? It basically gives them headroom for when AMD makes their move. Also notice these prices - $560 for the 980 that beats the 780Ti. In reality the parts that the 980 has are actually cheaper than the 780Ti (less cores, less bits,e tc) so the margins for them right now with the 980 are simply going to be amazing. Nvidia is in a good spot - 70% market share and holding the crown for best single GPU with huge margins. If/When they beef up the 980 it will be an absolute beast! Imagine if it was 384 or 512 bit with 2880 cores+.

September 18, 2014 | 11:11 PM - Posted by Mandrake

That 970 is a killer card. Wow. Brilliant stuff!

September 18, 2014 | 11:23 PM - Posted by StewartGraham (not verified)

Fantastic article and thanks for making a longer video - I'd like to see more video content from PCper! This certainly wasn't too long, if anything I'd be very interested to see longer videos from PCper in general!

September 18, 2014 | 11:26 PM - Posted by Ryan Shrout

Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and keep watching the Pcper.com front page!

September 19, 2014 | 08:58 AM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Speaking of YouTube, Nvidia put up a great video explaining VXGI. At first I thought it was something that would make games like Minecraft perform better (which it very well may), but the truth is much cooler:

http://youtu.be/GrFtxKHeniI

September 18, 2014 | 11:24 PM - Posted by StewartGraham (not verified)

Could you imagine if Nvidia cranked up the TDP? These GPUs would be insanely fast!

September 19, 2014 | 12:12 AM - Posted by arbiter

Nvidia seems to side on side of being conservative when it comes to their gpu's, AMD tends to go balls to wall well 2 diff ways of doing things and see long run who hurts most from it.

September 18, 2014 | 11:25 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

I'm surprised with the decent pricing on the 970. Are you sure this card is actually from Nvidia?

September 18, 2014 | 11:43 PM - Posted by Mandrake

The 970 seems like a sucker punch aimed directly at AMD. Nvidia is happy to aggressively price when they feel it works in their favour.

September 19, 2014 | 09:55 AM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

Economy 101.

September 18, 2014 | 11:39 PM - Posted by Robogeoff (not verified)

I'm impressed with the overclockability of Maxwell. Although, I wonder if watercooling will make much difference.

September 18, 2014 | 11:45 PM - Posted by Anonymous (not verified)

that is a very, VERY good point! this might mean that it will be much easier to get into x2 and x3 SLI!...... Ryan, how in the WORLD did you get your hands on PrecisionX 16!?! EVGA still won't let people download 15..... please send me a download link :). Best article and video out about this great topic! thanks

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