Card Layout and Photos

Before diving into the card itself I wanted to show off a few photos of how the GTX 980 came to me. Obviously the various manufactures will ship their cards in their own packaging, but I think Nvidia might be onto something here. Not only did this protect the card extremely well, but it also made for a cool way to display the card while I dug into our test bench to install it.

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Moving on to the GTX 980 itself, its hard to not get flashbacks. Nvidia decided to stick with the same overall design that we saw in the 700 series cards. This is the same design that is based a lot on the GTX 690 as well. So they kept the same blacked out design that the GTX 780 Ti had with the only change in the photos below is the change to GTX 980 there was a big change around on the back of the card, but I will get into that shortly. I’m not upset at all at the decision to stick with this design. Frankly when I heard they were launching new cards I was a little worried that the new cards wouldn’t have the same all metal shroud design or the access window giving you a view of the heatsinks. This design holds up extremely well and all metal design gives the cards a little weight and a feeling a quality. When I’m throwing down this kind of money it is always nice when the product doesn’t feel like it will break in your hands!

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Unlike AMD, Nvidia has decided to stick with their SLI bridges. With two connections, it means the GTX 980 is capable of up to quad SLI if you are looking to build a monster PC.

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With such a low TDP it’s not a shock at all that the GTX 980 only requires two six pin power connections. The GTX 680 also has this same requirement with its higher TDP. This should make finding the proper cables on your power supply easy.

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Display connections on video cards have been fairly standard for a while now. Looking back at the specifications for Nvidia’s main launches at the start of this review we can see that all of the cards have had the same two DVI, one DisplayPort, One HDMI configuration for a while now. This time around Nvidia changed things up. This time you get just a single DVI connection and one HDMI. The rest of the space is taken up by three full sized DisplayPort connections. The rear PCI slot has changed up as well with the air ventilation moving from slots to triangles. This looks like it gives a little more ventilation to help with airflow. While I love moving forward, I am a little worried that everyone isn’t ready for the move to DisplayPort. Most people I know are running DVI or HDMI, even I am in the same boat with only a single monitor in my house that supports DisplayPort. The HDMI and DVI’s should be enough for most people, but if you need more you are going to have to remember to pick up adapters as well. I should also point out that in the pictures below the PCI slot looks black, but that was just the lighting, it is the same finish that has been on previous Nvidia cards.

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As I mentioned before, the cooling design really didn’t change. So we have the same mostly sealed design that doesn’t vent hot air under the card. It does however vent some out of the rear of the card through the exposed heatsinks on the end. This isn’t as bad as the aftermarket cards that push all of the video card heat into your case. The blacked out heatsink also looks great showing at the rear of the card.

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Just like with all of the 700 series cards, you have the Geforce GTX logo on the top in green. When the card is powered up this lights up to show everyone what you are running. This is especially cool in things like the In Win 901. I have been running the GTX 780 in our build at LANs. The tinted glass makes it hard to see most things inside the case in the dark of LANs but you can see the video card glowing from across the room.

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While Nvidia did stick with the same overall cooling design, they did make a fairly major change around on the back of the card. For the first time, they decided to go with a backplate. We have seen AMD do this and a lot of the card manufactures have done this as well on their high end cards. Nvidia held out for a long time simply because in their testing backplates caused issues when running SLI with cards in slots next to each other. There is already very little space between two cards, adding even the thinnest backplate cuts into that even more. They came up with a creative solution though. As you can see in the photos below, there is a small panel in the top left corner. This panel when removed opens up a little room for airflow for the card you are placing this next too. So if you run quad SLI for example you would remove three of the panels but you can still leave it on for the top card.

So what would we want a backplate? Well first it looks great. The way that video cards are orientated in most cases means that once installed you can see the top edge of the card and the back PCB. A backplate is actually more visible that the front of the card in those situations. Nvidia used this to even put a small logo on the back and to make it easy to see the logo is actually upside down. The only thing that could do to improve on this in my opinion would be to trim the logo out in a nice Nvidia green to make it stand out a little more. Aside from aesthetics, backplates also add strength to your cards. Oddly enough with the all metal fan shroud design this doesn’t really add to much other than making the GTX 980 a tank. They also protect the back of the PCB from damage when you are handling the card or have it sitting around. This is especially great for someone like me who installs and removes their cards on a near daily basis. The last benefit is for people who water cool.

While I would never imply that the backplate makes the card water proof in any way. If you have ever been messing with your CPU water loop and had even just one tiny drip fall onto the PCB of your expensive video card you will know that a backplate can help prevent a disaster from a small drip.  

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Here are a couple shots of the removable backplate in use with another card right up against it like you would find in a tight SLI configuration. The opening is right next to the intake fan. While keeping your cards spaced it the best solution, it’s great that Nvidia considered multi card configurations when adding the backplate.

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Just to compare between the original GTX 780 and the GTX 980 I put them next to each other. The fan shroud design is the same, but the blacked out heatsinks and black trimmed nameplate really set the GTX 980 apart, just like the GTX 780 Ti.

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I’m not sure if it is from dirt/use of if they changed the color slightly but the GTX 980’s logo on the top edge of the card was slightly brighter. When lit up they both look the same bright green though.

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Just to show the new cooling design on the PCI slot a little more I put a shot of the GTX 780 up next to it.

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I’m sure you are curious what is up under the fan shroud and backplate right? Well we have a couple shots of the cooling design with and without the main heatsink. We can see that the main heatsink cools the GPU itself and the small heatsink on the back of the card handles the VRM cooling. There are flat heatpipes in the base of the heatsink to spread the heat out across off of the heatsink from the GPU. On the back up under the backplate things really don’t look different from the GTX 780Ti. You do still get a black PCB even though you can’t see it though!

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35680 19 Sep 2014 02:34
Well I hope you are watching Game24. Its time to pull the covers off of Nvidia's latest video cards. Curious about how it performs? Well check out my coverage!

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