[H]ard|OCP has had more time to spend with their reference GTX 980 and have reached the best stable overclock they could on this board without moving to third party coolers or serious voltage mods.  At 1516MHz core and 8GHz VRAM on this reference card, retail models will of course offer different results; regardless it is not too shabby a result.  This overclock was not easy to reach and how they managed it and the lessons they learned along the way make for interesting reading.  The performance increases were noticeable, in most cases the overclocked card was beating the stock card by 25% and as this was a reference card the retail cards with enhanced coolers and the possibility of custom BIOS which disable NVIDIA's TDP/Power Limit settings you could see cards go even faster.  You can bet [H] and PCPer will both be revisting the overclocking potential of GTX 980s.

"The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 makes overclocking GPUs a ton of fun again. Its extremely high clock rates achieved when you turn the right dials and sliders result in real world gaming advantages. We will compare it to a GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X; all overclocked head-to-head."

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