best 980 Ti, air cooled, wont be over clocking, SLI in few years time

[mnw48]

i originally got a Gigabyte g1 gaming 980 to be part of my new £2500 gaming pc thinking 4GB vram would be enough, then i played the free Batman Arkham Knight that came with it,,, cant run on 1080p max setting, not enough vram, little bit annoyed, so... as title asks, im after the best GTX 980 Ti brand, air cooled, wont ever be over clocking, as i will be SLI-ing or just upgrading again in few years time.

Would prefer stability over a factory superclocked card as i keep having bad luck with them, this one is a bit twitchy on GTA4 and Elite Dangerous unless i under clock it by 100-150 mhz, yet its testing back at the shop says its fine, and my prevous gaming system's 9800GTX+ had a similar problem but is temperature reading related, that had to be reduced from its default 738 to 670 to prevent its temperature reading from reaching the shutdown point, didnt notice a problem til its warranty was over

looked at a few threads, pointing towards EVGA, i assume they dont have badly positioned copper pipes like their GTX 970s

 

[TofuLion]

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-video-card-gvn98tg1gaming6gd

 

[geofelt]

My suggestion is to use a card with the stock blower cooler.
The EVGA GTX980ti SC has a mild factory overclock, and costs only $10 more than the base card. You could use either.
https://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=06G-P4-4992-KR

The blower cooler gets the heat directly out the back of the case.
This helps with sli so the top card does not get starved for cooling air.

I notice you have a high end build.
Have you looked at the new Samsung 950 PRO NVMe M.2 ssd?
a 1tb version is in the works.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/ssd950pro/overview.html

I found that raid-0 with a ssd did not really help performance.
You might be better off with a single 1tb 850 pro.


Here is a study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Most of the cards sold at sites like new egg are already overclocked when they leave the factory. Non-reference cards have changes ranging from just a better cooler (EVGA CS Series) to custom PCbs w/ improved components (VRMs, chokes, etc.). Then there's those special cards like (MSI lightning) which take the non-reference mindset to the extreme.

Which card you get will determine just how fast each card is. For the 9xx series, I prefer the MSI cards... Gigabyte is slightly faster but overall, seems to have a high disatisfaction rate from newegg users. Review wise, you can look at TPU

Gigabyte - 9.5
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_980_Ti_G1_Gaming/35.html

MSI - 9.6
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_980_Ti_Gaming/35.html

EVGA - 9.6
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GTX_980_Ti_SC_Plus/35.html

Asus - 9.6
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_980_Ti_STRIX_Gaming/35.html

And yes, I have experienced similar situations of having to cut card speed in certain games. My son uses a special set of Afterburner settings for BF4 and I set Afterburner to the factory OC'd settings to plat Witcher 3 (normally it has a 26% OC in all other games) on my SLI Asus DCII 780s (water cooled). The twin 970 build (MSI 970s, air cooled) does much better but still has to be turned down for BF4 and W3, but just a bit, still well over 20% OC.

As for Batman running out of RAM, I don't see it. No test site to date has yet to find a RAM deficiency at up to 1440p. Misinformed users have made the mistake of concluding that just because GPU-z reports RAM usage at a certain level, that this is somehow significant. It's not, it has no bearing on how much is actually needed to prevent deterioration in performance (fps), playability (stuttering) or image quality.

This argument has been put forth for years but never been duplicated in actual testing. It 1st started to gain traction as "2 vs 4 GB" with the 7xx series where they installed max Payne and it would not allow setting 5760 x 1080 with 2GB. But when they tricked it by installing a 4GB card, taking it out and swapping it out for a 2 GB card, it played at the same fps and with the same lack of issues.

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/gtx-770-4gb-vs-2gb-tested/3/

This is because a game's install program sees how much RAM is available and says "Oh cool .... it has 8GB, let me set aside 5 GB for my usage", that has nothing to do with what the game actually needs.

More here:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_960_g1_gaming_4gb_review,12.html
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/

But Extremetech did one of the better investigations which you can find here:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/213069-is-4gb-of-vram-enough-amds-fury-x-faces-off-with-nvidias-gtx-980-ti-titan-x

GPU-Z claims to report how much VRAM the GPU actually uses, but there’s a significant caveat to this metric. GPU-Z doesn’t actually report how much VRAM the GPU is actually using — instead, it reports the amount of VRAM that a game has requested. We spoke to Nvidia’s Brandon Bell on this topic, who told us the following: “None of the GPU tools on the market report memory usage correctly, whether it’s GPU-Z, Afterburner, Precision, etc. They all report the amount of memory requested by the GPU, not the actual memory usage. Cards will larger memory will request more memory, but that doesn’t mean that they actually use it. They simply request it because the memory is available.”

The article had a hard time finding games that could break that 4 GB barrier and BAA was not among them

When we started this process, I assumed that a number of high-end titles could readily be provoked into using more than 4GB of VRAM. In reality, this proved a tough nut to crack. Plenty of titles top out around 4GB, but most don’t exceed it. Given the lack of precision in VRAM testing, we needed games that could unambiguously break the 4GB limit.

We tested Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Company of Heroes 2, Crysis 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Evil Within, Far Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto V, Metro Last Light (original), Rome: Total War 2, Shadow of Mordor, Tomb Raider, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Out of those 15 titles, just four of them could be coaxed into significantly exceeding the 4GB limit: Shadow of Mordor, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, and Grand Theft Auto V. Even in these games, we had to use extremely high detail settings to ensure that the GPUs would regularly report well over 4GB of RAM in use.

You can read the graphs in the article, but Far Cry 4 couldn't break 4 GB @ 1440p, even the disastrously coded port for ACU couldn't break 4 GB, neither did GTAV or SoM. They had to go to 4k @ high detail to break 4 GB and at those settings, the game was unplayable.

While we do see some evidence of a 4GB barrier on AMD cards that the NV hardware does not experience, provoking this problem in current-generation titles required us to use settings [4k] that rendered the games unplayable any current GPU.....

The most we can say of a specific 4GB issue at 4K is that gamers who want to play at 4K will have to do some fine-tuning to keep frame rates and resolutions balanced,.... but that’s not grounds for declaring 4GB an unsuitable amount of VRAM in today’s games.

In short, at 1080, I don't see additional VRAM as addressing your issue.

 

[mnw48]

My suggestion is to use a card with the stock blower cooler.
The EVGA GTX980ti SC has a mild factory overclock, and costs only $10 more than the base card. You could use either.
https://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=06G-P4-4992-KR

The blower cooler gets the heat directly out the back of the case.
This helps with sli so the top card does not get starved for cooling air.

I notice you have a high end build.
Have you looked at the new Samsung 950 PRO NVMe M.2 ssd?
a 1tb version is in the works.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/ssd950pro/overview.html

I found that raid-0 with a ssd did not really help performance.
You might be better off with a single 1tb 850 pro.


Here is a study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

(gpu air flow out the rear)
my motherboard's pci-e x16 slots 1 and 2 are seperated by pci-e x16 slot 3,and a pci-e x1 slot, is why i chose the board, has plenty of room between dual SLI graphics cards for air flow, and the case has a good air flow though also, all fan slots filled (except side panel fans at the moment) with fan controller 😀 and i dont really like those cards, they are not as good at cooling the GPU as the other type, and as i will have plenty of space between cards i'd rather not limit myself to that type.
saying that.... they do look nicer 😀

(M.2)
i wanted something like that but it put me over budget on the system, so was just going to be 2x 250GB SSD, but wanted more space for games on it so added a 3rd for the hell of it, i get a real fast read almost the equivalent of the 3 drives performance combined but write sped is only just over twice that of one drive, i diodnt run any benchmarks on the 2 drive setup, the third drive might be pulled out and used else where if im happy with the 2 drive raid 0 speed test.

Just a few months back the new PC was, the M.2 were a lot more expensive, 2x SSD in raid was cheaper with same performance as the options available to me at the time, i didnt build the system myself as im not a well person and the summer isnt good for me, and dint want to wait, so it was custom built at Novatech, but its something i could get as a future upgrade as they are dropping in price, i could use the current SSD raid array just for games storage and get a cheap 250GB high speed M.2 thingy for the OS and apps, and maybe one big game like GTA5.(not finished GTA4 yet)
i currently have another raid 0 array comprising of 2x 3TB WD black that i couldnt fit on the sig that holds my other games

Just tested the speed in ATTO with 1024-8192 1GB, 1500MB/s read and 1200MB/s write, my 3x samsung 250GB 850 EVO in raid 0 32k stripe. (OS apps and some best games)
2x 3TB WD black raid 0, 128K stripe, about 332MB/s read and write which is about double the drive's individual max sequential write speed, (everything else)

excuse spelling mistakes im tired 😀

 

[mnw48]

Most of the cards sold at sites like new egg are already overclocked when they leave the factory. Non-reference cards have changes ranging from just a better cooler (EVGA CS Series) to custom PCbs w/ improved components (VRMs, chokes, etc.). Then there's those special cards like (MSI lightning) which take the non-reference mindset to the extreme.

Which card you get will determine just how fast each card is. For the 9xx series, I prefer the MSI cards... Gigabyte is slightly faster but overall, seems to have a high disatisfaction rate from newegg users. Review wise, you can look at TPU

Gigabyte - 9.5
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_980_Ti_G1_Gaming/35.html

MSI - 9.6
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_980_Ti_Gaming/35.html

EVGA - 9.6
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GTX_980_Ti_SC_Plus/35.html

Asus - 9.6
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_980_Ti_STRIX_Gaming/35.html

And yes, I have experienced similar situations of having to cut card speed in certain games. My son uses a special set of Afterburner settings for BF4 and I set Afterburner to the factory OC'd settings to plat Witcher 3 (normally it has a 26% OC in all other games) on my SLI Asus DCII 780s (water cooled). The twin 970 build (MSI 970s, air cooled) does much better but still has to be turned down for BF4 and W3, but just a bit, still well over 20% OC.

As for Batman running out of RAM, I don't see it. No test site to date has yet to find a RAM deficiency at up to 1440p. Misinformed users have made the mistake of concluding that just because GPU-z reports RAM usage at a certain level, that this is somehow significant. It's not, it has no bearing on how much is actually needed to prevent deterioration in performance (fps), playability (stuttering) or image quality.

This argument has been put forth for years but never been duplicated in actual testing. It 1st started to gain traction as "2 vs 4 GB" with the 7xx series where they installed max Payne and it would not allow setting 5760 x 1080 with 2GB. But when they tricked it by installing a 4GB card, taking it out and swapping it out for a 2 GB card, it played at the same fps and with the same lack of issues.

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/gtx-770-4gb-vs-2gb-tested/3/

This is because a game's install program sees how much RAM is available and says "Oh cool .... it has 8GB, let me set aside 5 GB for my usage", that has nothing to do with what the game actually needs.

More here:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_960_g1_gaming_4gb_review,12.html
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/

But Extremetech did one of the better investigations which you can find here:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/213069-is-4gb-of-vram-enough-amds-fury-x-faces-off-with-nvidias-gtx-980-ti-titan-x

GPU-Z claims to report how much VRAM the GPU actually uses, but there’s a significant caveat to this metric. GPU-Z doesn’t actually report how much VRAM the GPU is actually using — instead, it reports the amount of VRAM that a game has requested. We spoke to Nvidia’s Brandon Bell on this topic, who told us the following: “None of the GPU tools on the market report memory usage correctly, whether it’s GPU-Z, Afterburner, Precision, etc. They all report the amount of memory requested by the GPU, not the actual memory usage. Cards will larger memory will request more memory, but that doesn’t mean that they actually use it. They simply request it because the memory is available.”

The article had a hard time finding games that could break that 4 GB barrier and BAA was not among them

When we started this process, I assumed that a number of high-end titles could readily be provoked into using more than 4GB of VRAM. In reality, this proved a tough nut to crack. Plenty of titles top out around 4GB, but most don’t exceed it. Given the lack of precision in VRAM testing, we needed games that could unambiguously break the 4GB limit.

We tested Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Company of Heroes 2, Crysis 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Evil Within, Far Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto V, Metro Last Light (original), Rome: Total War 2, Shadow of Mordor, Tomb Raider, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Out of those 15 titles, just four of them could be coaxed into significantly exceeding the 4GB limit: Shadow of Mordor, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, and Grand Theft Auto V. Even in these games, we had to use extremely high detail settings to ensure that the GPUs would regularly report well over 4GB of RAM in use.

You can read the graphs in the article, but Far Cry 4 couldn't break 4 GB @ 1440p, even the disastrously coded port for ACU couldn't break 4 GB, neither did GTAV or SoM. They had to go to 4k @ high detail to break 4 GB and at those settings, the game was unplayable.

While we do see some evidence of a 4GB barrier on AMD cards that the NV hardware does not experience, provoking this problem in current-generation titles required us to use settings [4k] that rendered the games unplayable any current GPU.....

The most we can say of a specific 4GB issue at 4K is that gamers who want to play at 4K will have to do some fine-tuning to keep frame rates and resolutions balanced,.... but that’s not grounds for declaring 4GB an unsuitable amount of VRAM in today’s games.

In short, at 1080, I don't see additional VRAM as addressing your issue.

(VRAM) i was referring to the memory counter in the games graphics options, i decided to test it last night, i set the graphics settings and its memory counter to just slightly over its limit, it glitched on the benchmark just twice, if id blinked i would have missed it, so i set res to 1600x900 and set AA on, same pic quality as 1080p but with slightly better frame rate and no glitch, i may try play the game with full settings n ignore the mem counter to test it properly.

i may still get a GTX980 Ti anyway as i can do an upgrade deal with a friend of mine who got a GTX970 before we found out about the 0.5GB slower ram issue, that plus some cash he can have my GTX980, the GTX970 can go to my brother, some cash plus his GTX650 Ti, which can go in my secondary PC, and i end up with some cash towards the GTX980 Ti

(Brands)

so forget Gigabyte, and seems like just pick one of the other 3 at random lol
one may work better for me in my system than another, and i wont know til i try
my buying site choices are limited to ones i know, amazon, ebuyer and Novatech, will probably be the latter, but their prices are still scary

(side note, just got GTAV on steam offer yay 😀 )

 

[JackNaylorPE]

1. Again, there is no software, utility or game monitor that can accurately measure actual VRAM usage, you are seeing what the game wants to allocate based upon what is available, not what is needed.

2. There is no issue with the 970 other than nVidia not being quite up front with how the card was designed. Test site after test site has conformed this. Yes, youtubers / FUDers have made claims but they have never been duplicated when tested by reputable test sites. You have to actually put in an effort to make an issue happen and it is extremely hard to near impossible to duplicate under normal playing conditions. The sites have not been able to replicate the claimed problems without going to 4k but if you bought a 970 for 4k, it was a mistake, no single card made today "works" at 4k and even SLI / CF can not maintain 60 fps

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-geforce-gtx-970-vram-stress-test.html

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor GeForce GTX 970 VRAM stress test

At 2560x1440 I tried filling that graphics memory, but most games simply do not use more than 1.5 to 3 GB at that resolution combined with the very best image quality settings. This includes MSAA levels of up-to 8x. At the best settings and WHQD we tried, Alien Isolation, Alan Wake, BioShock Infinite, Hitman, Absolution, Metro Last Light, Thief, Tomb Raider, Asassin’s Creed Black Flag ...

Let me clearly state this, the GTX 970 is not an Ultra HD card, it has never been marketed as such and we never recommended even a GTX 980 for Ultra HD gaming either. So if you start looking at that resolution and zoom in, then of course you are bound to run into performance issues, but so does the GTX 980. These cards are still too weak for such a resolution combined with proper image quality settings. Remember, Ultra HD = 4x 1080P. Let me quote myself from my GTX 970 conclusions “it is a little beast for Full HD and WHQD gaming combined with the best image quality settings”, and within that context I really think it is valid to stick to a maximum of 2560x1440 as 1080P and 1440P are is the real domain for these cards. Face it, if you planned to game at Ultra HD, you would not buy a GeForce GTX 970.

Overall you will have a hard time pushing any card over 3.5 GB of graphics memory usage with any game unless you do some freaky stuff. The ones that do pass 3.5 GB mostly are poor console ports or situations where you game in Ultra HD or DSR Ultra HD rendering. In that situation I cannot guarantee that your overall experience will be trouble free, however we have a hard time detecting and replicating the stuttering issues some people have mentioned.

Utilizing graphics memory after 3.5 GB can result into performance issues as the card needs to manage some really weird stuff in memory, it's nearly load-balancing. But fact remains it seems to be handling that well, it’s hard to detect and replicate oddities

As for which one to pick, I prefer the MSI but I'd suggest looking at newegg user reviews and see just how happy their owners are with their purchase.