It's actually pretty tame compared to other beasts

Nov 17, 2014 14:42 GMT  ·  By

AMD has been gleefully launching 8 GB Radeon R9 290X graphics cards, and many people have been waiting for NVIDIA to do the same. It's not happening yet, but that doesn't mean that “normal” GTX 980 can't come out in the interim.

In the attached gallery you have the ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 980 video card, a GeForce GTX 980 with the usual 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM working at 7,010 MHz.

Normally, the board would work at 1,126 MHz base / 1,216 MHz GPU boost. But since this is a custom-cooled model with factory overclocking, it can jump to 1,279 MHz if needed.

Not the biggest factory overclock we've ever seen, but roughly 50 MHz is still not that bad for this day and age. Especially when you get a good and pretty quiet dual-fan cooler as part of the same deal.

Speaking of which, the DirectCU H2O technology supposedly improves cooling performance by a factor of 2 and makes this three times less noisy.

That said, you also get Dual-link DVI-I, HDMI and three DisplayPort connectors. Unfortunately, pricing info wasn't included in the press release, even though sales should be starting this month (November 2014). It will probably be a dozen or so dollars/euro over the stock $549 / €549 price.

Show Press Release

ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 980 (7 Images)

ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 980
ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 980, no boxASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 980, normal view
+4more