Asus has unveiled its latest take on Nvidia’s “king of the hill” GPU: the GTX 980 Ti. Dubbed the GTX 980 Ti Gaming Ice, Asus’ newest graphics card comes with a unique design and several interesting features. Bear in mind that this graphics card is solely aimed at PC enthusiasts and not for average consumers.
Like the recently announced Asus ROG Maximus VII Hero Alpha and ROG Maximus VIII Formula gaming motherboards, the GTX 980 Ti Gaming Ice also features RGB lighting, which can be customised via the same software used by the aforementioned gaming motherboards.
Specification-wise, the GTX 980 Ti Gaming Ice retains the 6GB GDDR5 VRAM found on the reference card. Despite this, Asus’ latest graphics card is clocked slightly higher with 2816 CUDA Cores and a base and boost clock of 1216MHz and 1317MHz respectively.
It’s worth mentioning that since the GTX 980 Ti Gaming Ice has a custom designed PCB, the graphics card requires two 8-Pin power connectors to be able to operate; reference GTX 980 Ti requires a combination of a 6-Pin and 8-Pin power connectors. Knowing this, overclockers would definitely be in for a treat since more power usually results in better overclocking capabilities.
The reason Asus’ GTX 980 Ti Gaming Ice is only meant for PC enthusiasts is due to the fact that it is encapsulated by a water block by Bitspower. This means that the graphics card utilises an open loop liquid cooling solution that average users may find difficult to install properly. The other reason is the price.
According to sources, the Asus GTX 980 Ti Gaming Ice will be retailing for a price of US$899 (about RM3,680), which is by no means an affordable graphics card. For those that aren’t keen on paying a huge amount on a year-old graphics card should instead wait for the imminent arrival of Pascal and Polaris GPUs sometime this year.
(Source: Asus via Overclock3D , WCCFtech)
