A post on Videocardz.com claims to have gotten hold of details of Nvidia’s new GTX 980. The post states that on September 19th, Nvidia will announce the GTX980 and 970, with the 980 being a brand new flagship model utilising the second generation of the Maxwell architecture.
The card itself looks as though it will sit between the GTX 770 and 780tTi in terms of specs. The main benefits the 980 will have over it’s previous generation is a higher base and boost clock (1126MHz and 1216MHz respectively), as well as an extra gigabyte of memory bringing it to 4GB – the same as AMD’s R9 290/x. Memory is running at the same speed as both the 770 and 780Ti (1750Mhz) and like the 770, will utilise a 256 bit memory controller giving it a bandwidth of 224GB/s compared to the 780Ti’s 336GB/s. The main improvement is in TDP performance with the 980 clocking in at just 165W, a full 65W less than the GTX 770 and 85W less than the 780Ti which also means that Nvidia have been able to drop the power connectors to two 6 pins.
Performance wise the 980 should be just behind the GTX 780 and far ahead of the GTX 770, it has 2048 CUDA cores compared to the GTX 770’s 1536, but sits slightly behind the GTX 780 which has 2304 cores (although improvements in architecture could make the reduced core count less of a deficit). Transistor wise the 780 and 780Ti both have 7.1 billion transistors, whilst the new 980 will have 5.2 billion slotting it roughly between the 780/Ti and the 770 which has 3.5 billion, although of course we won’t know exactly how fast it is until it is launched on Friday.
A German website has also reported that the 970 will be available for $399 whilst the 980 will be available for $599, which should equate to about the same price as the GTX 770 for the 970 and between the 780 and 780Ti for the 980.
What do you think about Nvidia’s new 980? Not a big enough jump or the perfect upgrade for your rig? Let us know.
