EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin smashes benchmark records with 2,200MHz overclock!

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin smashes benchmark records with 2,200MHz overclock!

EVGA’s custom graphics cards have traditionally featured fairly high overclocks over reference speeds, but how far can they be pushed? Scarily far, as it turns out. EVGA today revealed that the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin had managed to hit a whopping 2,200MHz overclock on liquid nitrogen cooling, more than double the 1,000MHz reference clock.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin was paired with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor, an EVGA X99 Micro2 motherboard, and EVGA SuperNOVA power supply. In 3DMark Fire Strike, it managed to achieve a stratospheric score of 27,861, nearly double the 14,333 that we observed in our review on the reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

A similar doubling of the score was observed in Fire Strike Extreme, where the Kingpin managed a score of 14,432, which incidentally, is still higher than the Fire Strike score we got on our reference card.

In Fire Strike Ultra, it posted a score of 7,736, putting it in the range of numbers we’re more used to seeing in Fire Strike Extreme.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, these are currently the single-card world records for 3DMark. However, it looks like the Intel Core i7-5960X has been overclocked as well to around 5.7GHz, so that probably contributed to the scores as well. Nevertheless, 3DMark scores are determined primarily by the graphics processing heft, so the record-breaking scores are still very much a product of the 2,200MHz overclock.

This is a card that has overclocking in its DNA. It is powered by two 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connectors and sports a 14+3 digital power phase design. In addition, to further drive home the fact that this is no ordinary custom card, EVGA has implemented a new way of purchasing for it. Believe it or not, the card is available at four different price tiers, depending on the approximate GPU ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) quality, or overclocking performance. Every piece of silicon varies in overclocking potential, and EVGA is now giving you the option to literally buy more overclocking headroom.

Of course, this is all just quantified in terms of overclocking potential, and EVGA is not guaranteeing any specific overclocking performance.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti Kingpin starts at US$849.99 for 72% ASIC quality, and goes all the way up to S$1049.99 for 80%. For a look at the other options, you can head over the EVGA’s website here.

And if you’re interested, you can also check the ASIC quality of your own card in GPU-Z by right clicking on the title bar and clicking “Read ASIC quality”.