ASUS GeForce GTX 980 

NVIDIA does give you some controls in their driver to improve overclocking performance—namely, the ability to increase the power limit by 25% and up the thermal limit to 94°C. I definitely expect additional performance improvements with custom boards once board partners figure out all the magical performance dials.

A new GPU architecture is introduced every two or so years, facilitated by a new silicon fab process, which allows designers to cram in more transistors, to up performance.

NVIDIA's new GM204 graphics processor brings the Maxwell architecture to the high-end.

After the tremendous success of Far Cry, German game studio Crytek released their shooter Crysis in 2007.

I've never seen such a quiet flagship card; it's the perfect choice if you value low-noise in addition to gaming performance.

Idle and non-gaming power draw is a good deal higher than the reference design's baseline value.

You can find the MSI GTX 980 Gaming online for $580, which is a fantastic price.

The MSI GTX 980 Gaming will also turn its fans off in idle or a light load, providing a perfect, noiseless experience.

Gaming temperatures are excellent, but no better than for other GTX 980 cards that are also much quieter.

We are seeing awesome overclocking potential from the ASUS GTX 980 STRIX, considerably better than the NVIDIA reference board and slightly higher than the MSI GTX 980 Gaming.

Their iGame GTX 980 Ti comes overclocked out of the box with a medium-sized overclock that results in a 10% performance increase over the reference design at 4K resolution.

The card comes overclocked out of the box with a large overclock, resulting in around an 8-9% performance increase over the GTX 980 reference design.

The 256-bit wide memory interface holds a standardized 4 GB of memory, with the bus clocked at 7.00 GHz on both the GTX 980 and GTX 970, which works out to a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s..

It would have been nice to also have the memory on the card overclocked out of the box since the memory chips have the headroom to do so.

The third-generation Delta-color memory compression tech helps the chip make the most of its 224 GB/s memory bandwidth.