14 DAY TRIAL // Companies like it if they can make a grand claim more often than not, but truly world-changing product releases ultimately happen pretty rarely. The upcoming EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Classified K|ngp|n Edition won't really shake the world, but it should rock the graphics card market quite a bit.
The GeForce GTX 980 Classified K|ngp|n Edition is the best high-end video card in EVGA's arsenal, or will be once it finally debuts.
The company didn't actually share the specifications, since it is only teasing the board for now. However, it did do something almost as good: released the 3DMark FireStrike benchmark result.
The board managed to score 20,816 points, which is a very high amount. Not sure how badly overclocked it was to make it happen though.
The board will surely be factory-tweaked to some extent, but EVGA likes to sponsor overclockers every so often, so that jaw-dropping 3DMark FireStrike score may have happened under controlled circumstances.
And by controlled circumstances we mean active overclocking, possibly with liquid cooling as well.
On the other hand, releasing that information when it's not a realistic indicator of the board's “normal” performance could be considered misleading in the long run, so it could go either way.
The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Classified K|ngp|n Edition
In the teaser pictures, we can see a black and white cooler (possibly ACX 2.0) with two fans, each of different bearing and blade design. The shroud is translucent.
EVGA says that the best voltage regulation module (VRM) in the industry was installed on the PCB (printed circuit board).
The OEM also designed the PCB in such a way that an active electrical trace always runs through it, to prevent frosting even when liquid cooling or LN2 is used.
The last confirmed hardware feature is the triple power input configuration, with two 8-pin ports and one 6-pin. Normally, even just a pair of 8-pin ports is considered a lot, enough for some serious clock tweaks, so you can imagine just what kind of dreams EVGA must have for this thing.
Availability and pricing
The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Classified K|ngp|n Edition will probably have to contend with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan-X, but maybe NVIDIA won't allow for that one to be customized at first. In any event, the price and arrival date for the K|ngp|n Edition aren't known.
But previous reports had the GTX 960 set for January 15, 2015, so maybe this board will be released at the same time.
The product is on display at CES 2015 at present, where it is overclocked considerably, but we'll see to that separately.
