Gtx 980 power requirements: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Specs

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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 ReviewMaxwell 1 Architecture: The Story So FarMaxwell 2 Architecture: Introducing GM204Maxwell 2’s New Features: Direct3D 11.3 & VXGIDisplay Matters: HDMI 2.0, HEVC, & VR DirectBetter AA: Dynamic Super Resolution & Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-AliasingLaunching Today: GTX 980 & GTX 970Meet the GeForce GTX 980The TestMetro: Last LightCompany of Heroes 2Bioshock InfiniteBattlefield 4Crysis 3Crysis: WarheadTotal War: Rome 2ThiefGRID 2SyntheticsComputePower, Temperature, & NoiseOverclocking GTX 980Final Words

As always, last but not least is our look at power, temperature, and noise. Next to price and performance of course, these are some of the most important aspects of a GPU, due in large part to the impact of noise. All things considered, a loud card is undesirable unless there’s a sufficiently good reason – or sufficiently good performance – to ignore the noise.

Having already seen the Maxwell architecture in action with the GTX 750 series, the GTX 980 and its GM204 Maxwell 2 GPU have a very well regarded reputation to live up to. GTX 750 Ti shattered old energy efficiency marks, and we expect much the same of GTX 980. After all, NVIDIA tells us that they can deliver more performance than the GTX 780 Ti for less power than the GTX 680, and that will be no easy feat.

GeForce GTX 980 Voltages
GTX 980 Boost Voltage	GTX 980 Base Voltage	GTX 980 Idle Voltage
1. 225v	1.075v	0.856v

We’ll start as always with voltages, which in this case I think makes for one of the more interesting aspects of GTX 980. Despite the fact that GM204 is a pretty large GPU at 398mm2 and is clocked at over 1.2GHz, NVIDIA is still promoting a TDP of just 165W. One way to curb power consumption is to build a processor wide-and-slow, and these voltage numbers are solid proof that NVIDIA has not done that.

With a load voltage of 1.225v, NVIDIA is driving GM204 as hard (if not harder) than any of the Kepler GPUs. This means that all of NVIDIA’s power optimizations – the key to driving 5.2 billion transistors at under 165W – lie with other architectural optimizations the company has made. Because at over 1.2v, they certainly aren’t deriving any advantages from operating at low voltages.

Next up, let’s take a look at average clockspeeds. As we alluded to earlier, NVIDIA has maintained the familiar 80C default temperature limit for GTX 980 that we saw on all other high-end GPU Boost 2.0 enabled cards. Furthermore as a result of reinvesting most of their efficiency gains into acoustics, what we are going to see is that GTX 980 still throttles. The question then is by how much.

What we find is that while our GTX 980 has an official boost clock of 1216MHz, our sustained benchmarks are often not able to maintain clockspeeds at or above that level. Of our games only Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, and Battlefield 4 maintain an average clockspeed over 1200MHz, with everything else falling to between 1151MHz and 1192MHz.  This still ends up being above NVIDIA’s base clockspeed of 1126MHz – by nearly 100MHz at times – but it’s clear that unlike our 700 series cards NVIDIA is much more aggressively rating their boost clock. The GTX 980’s performance is still spectacular even if it doesn’t get to run over 1.2GHz all of the time, but I would argue that the boost clock metric is less useful this time around if it’s going to overestimate clockspeeds rather than underestimate. (ed: always underpromise and overdeliver)

Starting as always with idle power consumption, while NVIDIA is not quoting specific power numbers it’s clear that the company’s energy efficiency efforts have been invested in idle power consumption as well as load power consumption. At 73W idle at the wall, our testbed equipped with the GTX 980 draws several watts less than any other high-end card, including the GK104 based GTX 770 and even AMD’s cards. In desktops this isn’t going to make much of a difference, but in laptops with always-on dGPUs this would be helpful in freeing up battery life.

Our first load power test is our gaming test, with Crysis 3. Because we measure from the wall, this test means we’re seeing GPU power consumption as well as CPU power consumption, which means high performance cards will drive up the system power consumption numbers merely by giving the CPU more work to do. This is exactly what happens in the case of the GTX 980; at 304W it’s between the GK104 based GTX 680 and GTX 770, however it’s also delivering 30% better framerates. Accordingly the power consumption of the GTX 980 itself should be lower than either card, but we would not see it in a system power measurement.

For that reason, when looking at recent generation cards implementing GPU Boost 2.0 or PowerTune 3, we prefer to turn to FurMark as it essentially nullifies the power consumption impact of the CPU. In this case we can clearly see what NVIDIA is promising: GTX 980’s power consumption is lower than everything else on the board, and noticeably so. With 294W at the wall, it’s 20W less than GTX 770, 29W less than 290X, and some 80W less than the previous NVIDIA flagship, GTX 780 Ti. At these power levels NVIDIA is essentially drawing the power of a midrange class card, but with chart-topping performance.

Moving on to temperatures, at idle we see nothing remarkable. All of these well-designed, low idle power designs are going to idle in the low 30s, especially since they’re not more than a few degrees over room temperature.

With an 80C throttle point in place for the GTX 980, it’s here where we see the card top out at. The fact that we’re hitting 80C is the reason why the card is exhibiting clockspeed throttling as we saw earlier. NVIDIA’s chosen fan curve is tuned for noise over temperature, so it’s letting the GPU reach its temperature throttle point rather than ramp up the fan (and the noise) too much.

Once again we see the 80C throttle in action. Like all GPU Boost 2.0 NVIDIA cards, NVIDIA makes sure their products aren’t going to get well over 80C no matter the workload.

Last but not least we have our noise results. Right off the bat the GTX 980 is looking strong; even with the shared heritage of the cooler with the GTX 780 series, the GTX 980 is slightly but measurably quieter at idle than any other high-end NVIDIA or AMD card. At 37.3dB, the GTX 980 comes very close to being silent compared to the rest of the system.

Our Crysis 3 load noise testing showcases the full benefits of the GTX 980’s well-built blower in action. GTX 980 doesn’t perform appreciably better than the GTX Titan cooler equipped GTX 770 and GTX 780, but then again GTX 980 is also not using quite as advanced of a cooler (forgoing the vapor chamber). Still, this is enough to edge ahead of the GTX 770 by 0.1dB, technically making it the quietest video card in this roundup. Though for all practical purposes, it’s better to consider it tied with the GTX 770.

FurMark noise testing on the other hand drives a wedge between the GTX 980 and all other cards, and it’s in the GTX 980’s favor. Despite the similar noise performance between various NVIDIA cards under Crysis 3, under our maximum, pathological workload of FurMark the GTX 980 pulls ahead thanks to its 165W TDP. At the end of the day its lower TDP limit means that the GTX 980 never has too much heat to dissipate, and as a result it never gets too loud. In fact it can’t. 48.1dB is as loud as the GTX 980 can get, which is why the GTX 980’s cooler and overall build are so impressive. There are open air cooled cards that now underperform the GTX 980 that can’t hit these low of noise levels, never mind the other cards with blowers.

Between the GTX Titan and its derivatives and now GTX 980, NVIDIA has spent quite a bit of time and effort on building a better blower, and with their latest effort it really shows. All things considered we prefer blower type coolers for their heat exhaustion benefits – just install it and go, there’s almost no need to worry about what the chassis cooling can do – and with NVIDIA’s efforts to build such a solid cooler for a moderately powered card, the end result is a card with a cooler that offers all the benefits of a blower with the acoustics that can rival and open air cooler. It’s a really good design and one of our favorite aspects of GTX Titan, its derivatives, and now GTX 980.

Compute
Overclocking GTX 980
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 ReviewMaxwell 1 Architecture: The Story So FarMaxwell 2 Architecture: Introducing GM204Maxwell 2’s New Features: Direct3D 11.3 & VXGIDisplay Matters: HDMI 2.0, HEVC, & VR DirectBetter AA: Dynamic Super Resolution & Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-AliasingLaunching Today: GTX 980 & GTX 970Meet the GeForce GTX 980The TestMetro: Last LightCompany of Heroes 2Bioshock InfiniteBattlefield 4Crysis 3Crysis: WarheadTotal War: Rome 2ThiefGRID 2SyntheticsComputePower, Temperature, & NoiseOverclocking GTX 980Final Words

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GeForce GTX 980 Folding@Home PPD Averages, Power Consumption & Research Projects

1. GPU PPD
2. Brands
3. Nvidia
4. GPU Folding@Home Profile

GPU FOLDING OVERVIEW

Folding@Home PPD for the GeForce GTX 980 represents the averages of folding work unit
samples collected from a wide variety of users different computer hardware configurations.

Average values are used to
best represent folding PPD performance of a GeForce GTX 980 across different F@H projects and user
variables such as power settings, overclocks, operating system and specific work units which can yield
wildly different highs and lows for PPD scores on the same GPU platform.

GPU PPD AVERAGE: ALL OS

830,958

Average of 500 most recent PPD samples

Data Samples: ALL OS

49,698

All Time

Stats as of Wednesday, 28 June 2023 12:04:28

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Folding STATISTICS GM204 [GeForce GTX 980] 4612 — Nvidia

DATA SAMPLES INFO Filter applied, PPD samples all time		AVERAGE FOLDING PERFORMANCE Based on ALL available PPD samples by filter				WORK UNIT PPD RECORDS All Time
OS FILTER	SAMPLES	PPD	WU Per 24hrs	Time Per WU	Points Per WU	BEST PPD	WORST PPD
All OS AVG	49683	670,148	3. 51	7 hrs 50 mins	190,684	1,196,503	4,558
Linux	3572	527,396	2.92	8 hrs 14 mins	180,749	924,839	172,878
Windows	46084	681,285	3.56	7 hrs 45 mins	191,519	1,196,503	4,558

12 WEEK AVG PPD CHANGE VS. WORK UNITS AVAILABLE — GeForce GTX 980

GPU PPD average changes week to week for a number of reasons such as credit for type of projects/causes available, varience in work unit difficulty, OS/GPU drivers, folding cores, GPU models, clocks, power targets etc.

The chart below serves as a way to see historical week to week performance change as PPD for a GPU is never a constant, as the work units processed are always changing.

Recent Work Unit Research Type Allocations — GeForce GTX 980

Average PPD is impacted by the types of research work units being done as they return different amounts of points and take different amounts of time.
The following shows the work unit allocation of research causes to better understand changes in PPD over time for the GeForce GTX 980.

24 HOUR WU ALLOCATION

INFLUENZA — 65.62%

UNSPECIFIED — 18.75%

CANCER — 15.62%

7 DAY WU ALLOCATION

INFLUENZA — 29.58%

CANCER — 19.25%

UNSPECIFIED — 17.84%

ALZHEIMERS — 16.9%

POLYMERASE — 16.43%

12 WEEK WU ALLOCATION

CANCER — 43.2%

LIQUID-PHASE-SEPARATION — 32.37%

INFLUENZA — 8.46%

POLYMERASE — 4.51%

ALZHEIMERS — 2.76%

BIOFILM — 2.59%

UNSPECIFIED — 2.46%

MEMBRANE TRANSPORT — 1.88%

PARKINSONS — 1.07%

CANNABINOID — 0.54%

DIABETES — 0.17%

GeForce GTX 980 kWh POWER CONSUMPTION & COST

Power consumption information for the GeForce GTX 980 is based on an average wattage taken from
vendor information for the lowest and highest power draws for the GPU under folding@home compute loads.

Wattage information is only for the GPU and does not include the host computers power usage.

GeForce GTX 980 COMPUTE
VS kWH USAGE
DAY, MONTH, WEEK & YEAR

Folding@Home compute projections for the GeForce GTX 980 can be used to help inform long term point goals and related costs based on 24/7 usage.

Duration	Nick Name	Points Average	Work Units Average	Power Usage kWh	Power Cost at $0.10 per kWh
Day	PPD	830,958	6.59	3.98 kWh	$0.40
Week	PPW	5,816,706	46.13	27.89 kWh	$2.79
Month	PPM	25,274,972	200. 45	121.18 kWh	$12.12
Year	PPY	303,299,670	2405.38	1454.16 kWh	$145.42

5 BEST PPD RESEARCH PROJECTS — GeForce GTX 980

The following data is the average PPD values for GeForce GTX 980 project work units based on multiple samples collected via the use of our Folding@Home dark mode web client.

PPD Rank	Project ID	Cause Research	PPD Average	Points WU Average	WUs Day Average	WU Time Average
1	12424	alzheimers	1,140,655	156,032	7.31	3 hrs 17 mins
2	18912	cancer	1,020,130	108,903	9.37	3 hrs 34 mins
3	18911	cancer	996,219	109,266	9. 12	3 hrs 38 mins
4	14561	covid-19	990,027	161,528	6.13	4 hrs 55 mins
5	18022	cancer	951,323	257,464	3.69	6 hrs 30 mins

5 LOWEST PPD RESEARCH PROJECTS — GeForce GTX 980

The following data is the average PPD values for GeForce GTX 980 project work units based on multiple samples collected via the use of our Folding@Home dark mode web client.

PPD Rank	Project ID	Cause Research	PPD Average	Points WU Average	WUs Day Average	WU Time Average
1	13463	covid-19	193,335	10,777	17.94	1 hrs 20 mins
2	13459	covid-19	332,143	12,850	25. 85	0 hrs 56 mins
3	16907	cancer	366,547	81,879	4.48	5 hrs 22 mins
4	13461	covid-19	386,407	13,410	28.81	0 hrs 50 mins
5	16497	cancer	397,699	121,206	3.28	7 hrs 19 mins

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

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Iron →
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Graphics Card Performance and Specifications → NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

9001 0 224 GB / s

General Information
Developer	NVIDIA
Release Year	2014
Video card category	Desktop
Video card type	Discrete
Interface	PCIe 3.0
Maximum resolution	4096 x 2160
GPU
Architecture	Maxwell 2. 0
Core	GM204
Number of chips 10 Process technology	28 nm
Number of transistors	5200 million
Area	398 mm²
Core clock	1126 — 1216 MHz
Universal shader units	2048
64
Texture Units (TMUs)	128
Pixel fillrate	72.1 GPixel/s
Texture fillrate (texel fillrate)	144 GTexel/s
Video memory
Type	GDDR5
Capacity	4096 Mb 900 07
Frequency	7012 MHz
Bus width	256 bit
Bandwidth
power consumption (TDP)		165 W
Max. allowable temperature	98° C
Min. power supply requirements	500 W
Auxiliary power connectors	6-pin + 6-pin supported APIs and technologies
DirectX	12
OpenGL	4.5
OpenCL	1.2
Shader Model	5.0
SLI / CrossFireX	SLI
Other technologies	• NVIDIA G-Sync • NVIDIA GPU Boost • HDCP 9023 7 • NVIDIA CUDA • NVIDIA PureVideo • NVIDIA PhysX • NVIDIA Surround • NVIDIA 3D Vision • FXAA • TXAA • MFAA • NVIDIA VXGI

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9 graphics card80

Features
Drivers
Price
Tests

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 video card is based on a 28 nm process technology and is based on the GM204-400 GPU.
The card supports Directx 12 (API). NVIDIA has placed 4096 megabytes of GDDR5 RAM, which is connected using a 256-bit interface.
The graphics processor operates at 1126 MHz, which can be increased to 1216 MHz. The number of CUDA cores is 2048, with a speed of 7000 Mbps and a throughput of 224 Gbps.

The power consumption of the video card is 165W, and the recommended power supply is 500W.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 supports Microsoft DirectX 12 (API) and OpenGL 4.5.

Specifications for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

GPU specifications:
Model:	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
Series:	GeForce 900
GPU model:	GM204-400
Architecture:	Maxwell
Process:	28nm
CUDA cores:	2048
Graphics Processing Unit (GPC):	4
Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs):	16
Texture units (TMUs):	128
Base clock:	1126MHz
Boost clock frequency (Boost):	1216 MHz (+90 MHz)
Number of transistors:	5. 2 billion

Video card dimensions:
Height:	11. 16 cm
Length:	26.67 cm
Width:	2 slots

Please note: in the table are the reference characteristics of the video card, they may differ from different manufacturers.

New drivers for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9 graphics card80

GeForce Game Ready Driver Desktop:

Operating System:
Windows 11

Version:
472.12 ^WHQL

Download [735.5 MB]

Type:
Standard

Operating System:
Windows 11

Version:
^WHQL

Download [685.1 MB]

Type: 9 0680
DCH