Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , December 07, 2015
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
Share:

MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK Overclocked 4K Review

Our second installment with the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK focuses in on gameplay at 4K and how viable it is with the fastest overclocked GTX 980 Ti we have seen yet. We will be using a reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti to show the full spectrum of the 980 Ti’s performance capabilities and emphasize the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK’s value.

Introduction

In this evaluation we will expand our testing on the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK. Our full evaluation focused in on gameplay at 1440p, in which the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK performed exceptionally well with max settings in most games. Today we will have our focus set on finding the best possible gameplay at 4K.

If you have not yet, please read our MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK Video Card Review prior to this evaluation today. In our first evaluation we tested the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK against the MSI GTX 980 Ti LIGHTNING with its highest overclock in head to head battle at 1440p. We also did a few comparisons against a reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti using apples-to-apples settings, which showed the range of performance the GTX 980 Ti GPU is capable of at 1440p.

Article Image

MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK at 4K

Thus far we have not seen any single GPU video card that is truly suited for 4K gaming when it comes to truly graphically demanding titles. The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X fell short of a reference GTX 980 Ti in our 4K review featuring the fastest video card from AMD on the market. In this evaluation we saw the GTX 980 Ti and competition have to sacrifice several visual quality settings in order to achieve playable gameplay.

Our goal is to find the highest playable settings possible at 4K using the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK at both its stock and overclocked operating frequencies. Our motivation behind this is that the GTX 980 Ti video card which had to sacrifice so many visual settings may be redeemed through this behemoth, possibly allowing us to enable a number of graphics options that are missed by other video cards at 4K. It will vary from game to game, but we can expect to see lower than maximum settings in most of our games today. The question is how close to maximum settings can we get while maintaining a stable level of gameplay.

We have high hopes for the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK’s performance at 4K. In our full evaluation we found the highest stable overclock yet on a GTX 980 Ti GPU. We manually increased the GPU frequency to 1340MHz base, with boost at 1441MHz. The actual in-game frequency turned out to be 1567MHz! The memory frequency also matched other custom overclocked GTX 980 Ti video cards at 8GHz.

For comparison the ASUS GTX 980 Ti STRIX DCIII OC overclocked to 1392MHz on the boost clock, running at 1531MHz in-game with an 8GHz memory clock. Similarly the GIGABYTE GTX 980 Ti G1 GAMING’s boost frequency overclocked to 1371MHz and increases to 1535MHz in-game. The memory clock was also 8GHz. Since the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK has a higher maximum overclock, we felt it was worthy to compete at 4K.

We achieved this overclock by first increasing the core clock without touching any voltage. To overclock we increased power limit to the highest amount which is 107% on this video card. The boost clock improved to 1401MHz without voltage, which corresponds to an in-game frequency of 1489MHz. After finding this frequency, we began increasing the GPU voltage and core clock until performance diminished. We used all 87mV available on the core voltage to bring the GPU boost clock up to 1441MHz, which ran at 1567MHz in-game! We also increased the memory frequency until performance diminished which happened at 8GHz.

Article Image Article Image

Overall we see some stark comparisons in relation to the reference GTX 980 Ti video card. At 1441MHz boost clock, it operates 365MHz faster in-game than a reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti. There is a substantial factory overclock when comparing the out-of-box MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK to a reference GTX 980 Ti. We find the boost frequency is 178MHz faster in-game at 1380MHz compared to 1202MHz on the reference video card. The big reason we are able to achieve stable performance at such high clock speeds is due to the liquid cooling unit from Corsair which works well in tangent with the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK's other incredible features.

Article Image

The MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK is currently selling between $740 and $750. Our direct competition will be with a reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti. According to PC Hound, the GTX 980 Ti is priced around ~$649 while the NVIDIA flagship TITAN X card costs $999. This comparison will allow us to continue our breakdown of the GTX 980 Ti GPU’s capabilities, extending our known 1440p playability into 4K gaming. It will also allow us to see examine if the price premium on the MSI GTX 980 Ti SEA HAWK is worth the money compared to a cheaper reference video card.