On the output side the reference board comes with one DVI port, One HDMI 2.0-compliant port, and three full-size display ports. And, with it cooling the low TDP of the 980, it's very quiet and cool, even under load. Still, let's hope some adopt it, because it remains a fine performer, particularly for a blower-style design. It's certainly not the cheapest cooler to produce, and with such a low TDP on the card, partners could get away with being a little thriftier. Whether manufacturing partners will adopt it, though, remains to be seen. Housing all that silicon goodness (in the reference design at least) is Nvidia's excellent and rather attractive aluminum cooler. There is a performance hit to this new setup, which has largely been negated by the 980's much higher base clock of 1126 MHz, and a boost clock of 1216 Mhz. This-along with a larger 2MB cache that Nvidia says results in fewer requests to the GPU's DRAM, and improved memory compression techniques-has resulted in a highly power-efficient architecture. Those power savings come from a set of underlying improvements to the architecture, most notably by giving each of the four warp schedulers (the distribution of threads/work across the GPU) their own pool of CUDA cores and execution resources, rather than having to share them out across each scheduler. That's a mighty impressive feat of engineering, particularly given the 980 hasn't relied on a new production process for its power saving prowess. But why compare GK204 to the fully unlocked GK110 chips of the 780 Ti and 780? The 980 matches and usually bests the performance of the 780 Ti, and yet it does so using far less power. Memory bandwidth has taken a hit too, with the 980 featuring a 256-bit memory bandwidth compared to the 384-bit bandwidth of the 780 Ti and 780. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that's a significant decrease from the 2880 CUDA cores and 240 texture units of the 780 Ti, or even the 2304 CUDA cores and 192 texture units of the 780, although it's a significant boost over the 680 many potential 980 customers will be upgrading from.
![gtx 980 metro last light benchmark gtx 980 metro last light benchmark](https://techgage.com/reviews/nvidia/geforce_gtx_980/5760x1080_metro_last_light.png)
That adds up to a total of 2048 CUDA cores and 128 texture units. Inside each GPC is a dedicated raster engine (the conversion of vector graphics into pixels), along with four SMs containing 128 CUDA cores, a Polymorph Engine, and eight texture units. Just like Kepler, the Maxwell GM204 chip featured in the 980 is built on a 28nm process made up of an array of graphics processing clusters (GPCs), streaming multiproccessors (SMs), and memory controllers. Nvidia has accomplished this power-saving feat by making some significant changes with its Maxwell architecture. That's of even more benefit if you're running dual, triple, or even quad-SLI configurations, where multiple GPUs tend to require more cooling. It also means that the 980 can run at its faster boost clock more of the time without it having to clock down to combat heat.
![gtx 980 metro last light benchmark gtx 980 metro last light benchmark](http://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Metro-1440.png)
With a lower TDP the GTX 980 runs cooler, which means its cooling fan can spins slower, which results in less noise. That 85W difference is significant, not just for power consumption savings and the option to use a less demanding power supply, but in heat, noise, and performance too. Now Playing: Nvidia GTX 980 Review - GameTech By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's