Crow2099

That may be true now due to the Titan X having a higher memory bus bandwidth. But at the original date of my post was before its release. But right now we will have to see where World records hit in benchmarks between the two cards to determin which one comes out the victor.

So I figured out why my frames were being capped at 225 FPS during my benchmarks and I fount it through GPU-Z. The top card was running at PCIe @ 16x 2.0 and the second card was running at PCIe @ 8x 2.0 and 1.1 (It would continuously switch between the two). After doing a BIOS update the top card now runs at 3.0 and the second card now swaps between 3.0 and 1.1 still and still runs at 8x and not the full 16x. But I am getting much higher FPS during benchmarks. I have gone into the BIOS to see about forcing the PCIe lanes to run at Gen3 only but that wasn't an option. Just (Auto, Gen1, and Gen2). I also went into power management of the PCIe and turned off any power saving managent it had seeing that could affect what speeds the slots would run at but that didn't chance the speeds the second card was running at. So basically I am still not getting the full usage of my second card in my benchmarks to get the real numbers I am looking for on air seeing as there still isn't an EK water block out for the card. If anyone else out there might have an idea on how to force my second card to run at full speed please hit me up and let me know and I will see if it works.

I can see about some OC results on a single card but as stated in my review that when I have two in SLI mode it caps the frames at 225 FPS but with one at stock was getting around 300+ FPS. I think it just might be a driver issue. So I'm going to wait till the next driver update and try again.

This is my personal review of the EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Classified Kingpin Edition. I have two insalled in my rig in SLI. Hopefully this review will help who ever is reading this make a firm decision on whether to buy or not to buy this card. Here is a link to EVGA's site to read up on the specs of the card. http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=04G-P4-5988-KR And for purchasing the card I recomend Newegg seeing they seem to be getting the cards available for sale on a fairly regular basis. Pros: This card is incredibly fast right out of the box. No other single GPU card can compete with this beast. It is quite nice that the default fan profile is set to zero rpm under 60C but I personally prefer to have the fans running at about 40% to keep the temps down in the 40s range at idle till EK finally releases a water block for this card. The structual integrity of the card has been much improved upon compared to the 780 Ti Kingpin. There is no sign of any droop/sag when installed and the stock cooler stays flush with the PCB compared to the 780 Ti variant where the cooler tries to raise away from the PCB on the far end which can directly impact cooling performance which can impact overall performance of the card. The LEDs are a nice little touch to the card and fun to play with but in all honesty it is just a little gimmick and will be replaced with a water block when released. Raw performance on a single card is pretty nice. While playing BF4 on ultra settings at 1440p I was getting from the 80s to 90s FPS and with two cards in SLI was getting from 125 to the 144 FPS. Note: (My monitor is an Asus RoG Swift PG278Q) I'm sure with the right overclocking you should be able to reach about 100 to 100+ FPS on a single card at that resolution and should have that with no overclocking if running a 1080p monitor. For Crysis 3 with all the settings at max with (MFAA 8X High) I was only getting around 27 to 36 FPS and with two cards that bumped up to 60 and 70 FPS. Just keep in mind I play at 1440P so you should be getting some better frames at 1080p. The power consumption is quite a bit less on these cards compared to the 780 Ti Kingpin. While running Fur Mark or other benchmarks to stress the GPUs in SLI I was pulling just over 500W and with the 780 Ti Kingpin in SLI I was pulling around 800W. Quite the difference. Cons: A bit pricy but if you look back to the 780 Ti Kingpin before the launch of the 900 series it cost a little bit more so it could have been worse. It is a bit hard to mount the scews on the bracket in a 900D seeing that is my case. But already knew that was going to be a problem again seeing as I still own my 780 Ti Kingpin cards. And I really don't know how big of a problem that is really going to be for owners of different cases seeing the only other cases I still own are not built to even hold such a giant card in the first place. But one thing for sure it more than likely won't fit any mini ITX cases except the Bitfenix Prodigy that I know of off the top of my head. So I would go with a smaller card unless you want to make some hardcore perminant modifications to your case just to fit this card. Same goes for some Micro ATX cases. Make sure you read the specs of your case and measure before you buy. During benchmarks on Futuremark with a single card I was getting good FPS but when running them in SLI and running the same benchmark I was getting a capped 225 FPS where as running a single card I was getting around 300+ FPS (Non-Overclocked). Don't know if it is a driver issue or something but will eventually figure it out. In Closing: I really hope this was informitive to y'all in helping make y'alls decision on this card and if you have any questions don't be afraid to shoot me a message and I will try and get to you as quickly as possible. Thanks for taking the time to read my review and have a nice day. The Rig: Processor: Core i7 5960x @ 4.0GHz Motherboard: Asus Rampage V Extreme Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum (4x4GB) 16GB DDR4 2800MHz GPU: 2x EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Classified Kinpin Edition in SLI CPU Cooler: Corsair H110 with Corsair 140SP fans instead of the fans that came with the unit. Power Supply: Corsair AX1200i Case: Corsair Obsidian 900D Hard Drives: SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB, WD Black 1TB, G. Skill Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe 8x SSD Here is a link to my original build log here on Linustechtips. http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/252688-the-slaughter-house/

I have written my own review of the new 980 Kingpin on Newegg. If you would like to read it the reviewer name is Richard D. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487099&cm_re=980_kingpin-_-14-487-099-_-Product

So I have made a couple of changes to the build and it now has a G. Skill Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe SSD and that holds my games and most commonly used programs and I replaced the two 780 Ti Kingpins with two 980 Kingpins. I also have a water cooling set up in my rig for the GPUs but unfortunately the 980 Kingpins do not have water blocks made for it yet so my water cooling set up is no longer in use till EK releases the new blocks.

I have to say the true bottleneck for me in this rig is the 3GB of Vmem from my GPUs. Running CoD AW at max settings I still run at the games capped frame rate of 91 FPS but it does take up all 3GB of Vmem. I can run Crysis 3 at max settings at 80-120+ FPS and it takes up all 3GB of Vmem (Crysis 3 really puts the strain on my cards by running up my GPU temps to 80 Degrees Celsius). And running Skyrim with all of my mods and ENB Series it still crashes out and I firmly believe it is due to the limited Vmem. So I am really wanting 2 EVGA Geforce GTX 980 Classifieds for 4GB Vmem and if Skyrim still crashes out on me then I will just have to do away with ENB Series.

lol. If only. But that would require me doing LN2 cooling of my whole rig and having extensive knowledge of proper overclocking to get up in those rankings.

It does have results for those configurations but there is also a Hall of Fame for single card and two card SLI/CFX configurations.

Build Log: Slaughter House This Pc is an Absolute beast compared to my prior machine which is an AMD Phenom II x4 9600b on a Micro ATX Biostar Motherboard with Patriot (2x2GB) 4GB DDR2 400Htz ram and an XFX Radeon HD 6870 2GB graphics card. The new Rig Processor: Core i7 5960x Motherboard: Asus Rampage V Extreme Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum (4x4GB) 16GB DDR4 2800MHz GPU: 2x EVGA Geforce GTX 780 Ti Classified Kinpin Edition in SLI CPU Cooler: Corsair H110 with Corsair 140SP fans instead of the fans that came with the unit. Power Supply: Corsair AX1200i Case: Corsair Obsidian 900D Hard Drives: SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB, WD Black 1TB Peripherals Monitor Main: Asus RoG Swift PG278Q Monitor Secondary: SAMSUNG SyncMaster TA350 Keyboard: Logitech G15 Mouse: Madcatz R.A.T 7 Left hand unit: Nostromo n52 by Belkin Speakers: Logitech Z-506 5.1 Surround I plan on doing a custom water cooling loop for the two GPUs and at a later date a custom water cooling loop for the CPU. I have already spent around $5k on this PC and I need to recuperate a bit. I have to give a huge shout out to my buddy Ray up at Frys for helping make sure I got everything I wanted for this build. Thanks a lot man. As for benchmarking I am still working on getting this rig into the Futuremark Hall of Fame for Firestrike and Firestrike Extreme. But I was able to get get into the Hall of Fame for SkyDiver at 59th place this morning.