Continued Discussion over the GTX 970 and 980 / Leaked GTX 980M / 970M Specs

Some Experiences so far by users:

Now one of my friends happened to get the Gigabyte G1 Windforce Edition of the GTX 970 and fortunately for him, it was the final piece.

So big thanks to fellow Diablo III Kaki; Visco (who heads the Local Synarchy Team for Battlefield 4 Competitive matches) who shared his experience with Darryl who shared that with me. Darryl has and is selling a R9 290X to make way for either 2 of these in SLI or the Big Maxwell.

Mark "Visco" Lee shared his overclocking experience and man were Darryl and I impressed. Now I said before in a previous post that the Maxwell 900s overclock like a beast. But Mark got a really impressive overclock out from this one.

Now I'd be happy to get to Boost 1.45GHz, but Mark managed to get well beyond the 1.5 Ceiling, at 1552 MHz, that's a full Half a Gigahertz above the Reference Base Clock and 374 MHz above the base Boost. He's still finding the maximum Overclock that he can stretch to this graphics card.

Mobile Power: GTX 980M and GTX 970 Specs Leaked.

Now as to confirm that this is the true specs of the GPU, I'm gonna rule out absolute. However, judging from the leaked benchmarks we've seen, it does look legit to some extent. But having said that, this is not by any means confirmed.

So let's go over these pretty quick:

GTX 980M

Now the GTX 980M and the Desktop 970 share very similar core configuration, and similar Core Speeds but with obviously lower memory clocks. It has 1664 Cores which operates faster in proportion to the 1538 Cores based off the GK-104 from the GTX 880M, 780M, 680MX and the Desktop 770 and GTX 680. So the performance of this GPU should sit somewhere in between the GTX 680 and but closer to the GTX 780.

Now like the previous generations, the GTX 970M follows the #70's notion of having a 192-bit memory bus interface. And with some  shader blocks disabled, there should be fewer cores than the GTX 980M which makes obvious sense since they shouldn't perform too close in league with each other. Obviously it should fall behind the GTX 980M but I was impressed at how already capable even the GTX 970 is / will be.

As for power consumption of these cards, I'm expecting a lot more power efficiency even if they perform a lot better than the GK 104 based Mobile GPUs. Already proven with their Desktop GTX 970, so I guess the efficiency shouldn't be far off either.

This information is based off Notebookcheck's German section. This I translated off from there. 

#Update 05-October: It seems that MSI has dropped a leak in here!

For all I know, this could very well be the GTX 980M, As the 8192 Megs of GDDR5 RAM gave it away. Nobody can confirm this, but I'm sure this could be the GTX 980M. The scores are pretty good. I scored a 13200 on my GTX 780, which is heavily overclocked. The boost clock tops up to a max of exactly 1.2 GHz.

I also checked the typical median for a GTX 780 and it averages to a P-Score of around 12500. I said that the GTX 980M is close to the GK110 GTX 780, but I didn't expect it to be this close.

NVidia GM204 Maxwell GTX 980 and GTX 970 Launches! First Thoughts!

OKAY! Let's do a little follow up discussion with the Desktop GTX 980 and GTX 970 released yesterday.

Now I digress on some of the specs that I originally post the last time. So let's go through these quick.

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GTX 980
Core Config: 2048:128:64
Core Clock: 1126, 1216 Boost
Mem Clock: 7000 MHz
Memory: 4GB GDDR5
Bus Width: 256
TDP: 165

Launch Price: 549 USD

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GTX 970
Core Config: 1664: 104: 64
Core Clock: 1050, 1178 Boost
Mem Clock: 7000 MHz
Memory: 4GB GDDR5
Bus Width: 256
TDP 145

Launch Price: 329 USD

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QUICK SUMMARY

We know that these cards perform really good, and overclock really good, power consumes really good, overall excellent cards from both board partners and even just the reference card.

I'm not gonna post any benchmarks because you can just find a whole chunk at Guru3D and Tom's Hardware. Those are where I source my info everytime new tech launches out. Moreover I don't have the cards and neither do I have the money till at least someone can sponsor me a build! But definitely I can say are the following:

- Power Consumption totally blows the competition. Even SLI Configs of Both GTX 970 and 980s (which I'll quickly touch later) does match or trade blows with a single R9 290X which is pretty sad for AMD. Yup, that's right, I checked. This can save potentially a lot of money off the power bill if you leave your rigs on 24/7 compared to any of the flagship cards before it.

- Impressive enough is the performance at 4K  despite running at a narrower 256 Bit Bus-width. The larger Maxwell L2 Cache and the additional 1GB GDDR5 Memory over the GK110 does well to compensate it.

- Direct X 12 Ready, that much is certain. As to how Direct X 12 works yet remains to be seen.

BUYERS GUIDE!

Why GTX 980? As I found after various reviews, a single GTX 980 is more than good enough for 1080p, 1440p and decent 4K gaming. Though it is cheaper than the 780 Ti at Launch and still currently cheaper now, it's still slightly high a bit. The efficiency however more than makes up for it especially in the long run over the Kepler Based 600 and 700 Series. You pay a slight premium now but you pay less on power later. Even if you overclock which the card can take happily and gain some pretty nice gains, that shouldn't be any problem. Speaking of overclocks, Maxwell happily takes it no issues, with many board partner GTX 980s coming impressively close to the Titan Z. Should you want something a little cheaper, there are also alternatives.

Why GTX 970?
The GTX 970 is also a good card, and a very palatable and very nice price tag to boot at 329 USD which is currently cheaper than the R9 290X by a considerable amount while trading blows and beating R9 290X in terms of performance. Whack a hefty overclock in, and the GTX 970 comes surprisingly on par with the more expensive GTX 980. Cooling from just the reference cooler still can handle this though IMHO requires abit of bling update. :)

All around, still beats the R9 290X while being cheaper and factor in power savings.

But then comes SLI which IMO brings the GTX 970, (in all honesty, Not the GTX 980 but still makes an admirable combination) into its own. With a total price tag of 660 USD (only 110 more than a standard 980), it blows the R9 290s / 290Xs in Crossfire, R9 295X2, Titan Blacks in SLI, and the Titan Z. All these competing cards (except the 290 but bearing in mind power, cooling and noise) all cost a lot more. Some of the highest end 780 Tis and the R9 290Xs still cost the same as 2 GTX 970s. Factor that and it's probably no brainer there.

BOTTOMLINE! 

As of now, it's more of the GTX 970 than the 980 that will spell nightmares and headaches for AMD because it is the perfect counter for the R9 290 And the 290X in almost every possible aspect; performance, power efficiency, heat and acoustics, all for 329 USD. The GTX 980 isn't bad too, don't get me wrong, it's a great card indeed too! But it's more the GTX 970 shining for its sweet spot value for money. And I quote Darryl, a friend who owns a R9 290X I made in my Top 5 GPUs:

970 hits the sweet spot at 329usd...thats how much my 290X is worth now *cries*

Yup, AMD, you guys just got your ass kicked. However personally, it's no fault of AMD because nVidia did play their cards well. AMD had their dominance for a while for performance per dollar value. Also the Bitcoin and litcoin Mining craze are still the main reasons why AMD GPUs are still good for what they are. I loved the R9 290Xs for its initial value-for-money option till this came by!

Generally again guys, you don't need the cards from board partners to do the graphics work for you. Well to each his own, you can use those dual fan/tri-fan cooling cards if you want. Even so the base Reference GTX 980 and 970s are still good in their own right if you want to cut down cost a tiny bit more for these cards really overclock well, well over 1.4 GHz and some tip beyond 1.5 Ghz on Core and 8GHz on Memory which is really nice. So give these cards a shot. But my full recommendation for value is the GTX 970 in Single or SLI configurations.

Maswell GM204 in Full Force: GTX 980, GTX 970 and the GTX 980M Unconfirmed Benchmarks pop up

Now nVidia shockingly decided to skip the GTX 800 line of GPUs and went a generation further to the GeForce 900 Series, I understand that is probably to make it more inline with the newest Architecture that primarily takes the form of the Maxwell Core that we've first seen in the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, the GTX 860M, GTX 850M and the GeForce 840M. The next couple of months we will see the full force of the GeForce 980 and the 970 and the 980M and the 970M.

In the meantime, leaked benchmarks have surfaced: And here they are. We'll go through the GPUs in detail.

GTX 980 and GTX 970

Now after looking at the benchmarks, now say if you're using a GTX 780 or a GTX 780 Ti, I would recommend you stick to what you're using because the upgrades don't produce a big FPS change. Overclocking your current cards which should be highly doable, would still net most of these scores that you can see across the board. Moreover, if memory serves, the GTX 980 operates on a weaker bus-width at 256-bit. However, it's interesting to note the Maxwell's massive upgraded 2MB Cache that we've seen in the 750 Ti and the GTX 860M means Memory speeds won't take that large of a hit. So it'll be intriguing to find how it runs in high-resolution displays like 4K 3840 x 2160 or Surround.

But summarily, the GTX 980 would be the card to replace the 780 Ti, and the GTX 970 for the GTX 780.

Quick Specs of Each Card:

GTX 980

Arrangement Core: 2560:160:64 (Rumors CUDA Count is 1920)

Core Clock: 1050 MHz Boost

Memory Clock: 7.01 GHz

Memory: 4GB GDDR5

Bus Width: 256

Memory Bandwidth: 224 GB/s

GTX 970
Arrangement Core: 2304:128:64 (Rumors that CUDA Core is 1664)

Core Clock: 1050 MHz Boost

Memory Clock: 7.01 GHz

Memory: 4GB GDDR5

Bus Width: 256

Memory Bandwidth: 224 GB/S

MOBILE GTX 980M AND GTX 970M

Now these two GPUs are IMHO my stars in this one as you can tell by the benchmarks, The GTX 980M at stock performs just a thousand points under the GK-110 Core Based GTX 780 that I have. Now that's actually a crazily impressive score because it's quite close to the more power hungry DESKTOP card. It's leaps and bounds beyond the GTX 880M, even the GTX 970M still surpasses the 880M by a respectable margin. It's already impressive that a single GTX 980M is just a small fraction away from the Dual GTX 780Ms and will probably beat the 870Ms in SLI. And the SLI Config whoops SLI-ed GTX 770's butt big time, and is placed not far behind to the R9 295X2.

Now we've already known Maxwell to be already much more power efficient than the Kepler which was the designed to power optimize the Fermi Generation.

Specs are hard to come by at this point but we'll see as time goes on.

BOTTOM LINE

With that hype coming in, I hope the true benchmarks would be about within 10% of the scores when the actual stuff comes out. We'll know as soon as the GTX 980 (M) and GTX 970 (M) launches,