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The King is dead. Long live the King. Nvidia has discontinued its flagship GTX 780 Ti, replacing it with the brand-new GTX 980, powered by its new Maxwell architecture. It's the fastest single-chip graphics card money can buy - but the takeaway for many will be that there's no revelatory performance increase over Nvidia's existing top-end hardware. This is a refined, ultra-power efficient replacement with a relatively small performance bump, as opposed to the next big new thing in graphics technology.Maxwell's power efficiency shouldn't be so readily discounted though. Performance graphics cards typically consume an absolute maximum of 250W - at full-pelt, that translates into an awfully large amount of heat. Hot chips need cooling, in turn requiring elaborate cooling assemblies, which can produce unwanted noise. The GTX 980's TDP limit is a mere 165W, so the implications here are obvious - the GTX 980 is capable of being deployed in a much larger variety of PCs: living-room small form factor units being the obvious example.
Our review card features the premium metallic chassis introduced with the GTX Titan - clean, industrial, cool and quiet. From an aesthetic standpoint, differences are relatively minor - the PCB backing of the older Nvidia cards has given way to a plastic shroud that more fully encloses the components. A plastic tab on the rear of the unit can be removed in order to facilitate better airflow, but the major differences come on the back-plate: Nvidia's established line-up of dual DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort gives way to a new arrangement: one DVI, one HDMI and three DisplayPorts. The new array of ports has been designed to facilitate easier set-up of surround G-Sync - which still requires DisplayPort to function. Also of interest is that the HDMI port is based on the 2.0 standard, meaning support for 4K resolution at 60Hz.
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