 The 980 classified from EVGA has been out for a little bit now, and while we've been tied up with things like the Miner Oil project, we thought better late than never, so here we go. By the way, I suggest you guys stay subscribed as a little bird may have told me that whole room water cooling part one is probably coming soon. From December 13th to 20th, 2014, you can save on select Intel CPUs, NUCs, and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers. Click now to learn more. Let's start with a brief overview of how the reference GTX 980 stacks up against the GTX 980 classified. EVGA has increased the effective memory clock of their 4GB of VRAM by an earth-shattering 10MHz. This may seem a little bit funny, but it's actually a very good idea. GTX 980 cards are equipped with auto-balancing power rails, which take the total power the card is allowed to use, and instead of having it a hard split between the core and memory, they allow it to be used as a pool and allocated to whichever you prefer. EVGA seems to have recognized this and has widely focused their power budget on their core overclock instead of their memory overclock, which improves performance by a lot more than memory overclocking itself, increasing the base clock speed from 1126 to 1291MHz and the boost clock speed from 1216 to an actually earth-shattering 1393MHz. But we'll take that even further later on. The I.O. has been altered, but going from the stock setup of DVI-I, one HDMI, and three DisplayPorts to DVI-I, one DVI-D, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort. This feels like a strange choice given that G-Sync displays require DisplayPort to enable G-Sync on them, and given that DisplayPort can be inexplicably adapted to DVI-I. I would have preferred to have left this as the default config. The card is also slightly longer than the reference at 11 inches and a lot taller at 5.94 inches, compared to the stock card's 4.367 inches. These size changes were made to accommodate the monstrous ACX 2.0 cooler. The cooler features dual 100mm fans with 11 blades each just above the extremely large heatsink. EVGA claims that it will perform 26% cooler and 36% quieter than a reference card, and our testing it was able to impressively keep this card at a relatively cool 68 degrees while overclocked and under heavy load. We don't have an acoustic chamber yet, so I can't tell you exactly how loud it was, but even when we made it suffer, it wasn't annoying. Amongst the sleek black shroud and red accenting, we also found a tastefully illuminated logo that, in a standard configuration at least, will face out of your case. But what's that just above the logo? Is that a BIOS switch? Does this card support dual BIOS? No, it does not. It has triple BIOS support! The three BIOS modes allow you to have your TDP change when you change the BIOS modes and also change the fan curve accordingly. The three modes are LN2 mode, overclocking mode, which is just a slightly more tame version of LN2 mode, and normal mode for the casuals out there. In the box, you'll find a poster, a DVI to VGA adapter, two nicely sieved dual 6-pin to 8-pin adapters, a case badge, various EVGA pamphlets, and a non-conductive film just in case you want to switch to another aftermarket cooler. Overclocking was simple enough with auto-balancing power rails. I recommend you only really focus on your core clock speed, just so you know. I cranked voltage and then power limit and then started fiddling around with the core. I found it went above a certain threshold. GPU boost would kick in and throttle the card back down to exactly 1450 megahertz. This was a little odd, as GPU boost is usually a little bit more dynamic than that. But regardless, after applying a core clock of plus 110, I found myself with an all-around overall stable overclock of 1570 megahertz, the highest we've been able to achieve on a GTX 980 of any kind so far. After poring over my benchmarking numbers, it was fairly clear that this was a significant boost over the reference 980. Also, please note that Shadow of Mordor has an FPS cap of 100, so both the reference 980 and the classified card were both capped off. As with all of our GPU reviews, we're using our standard test bench. The specs for which you can, I guess, find on the screen you're looking at right now, and all of the graphics cards that are used in this test are overclocked. If you want to see my settings for them, you can check the link in the description down below. Speaking of down below, what could be lower than Audible's price for a month's membership? You might be able to answer that question after listening to Money, Master the Game, Seven Stimple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins. After recently listening to a TED Talk hosted by Tony Robbins, I've been interested in his works, and if you are interested in them as well, you can listen to them while driving, commuting, or on public transit, working out, doing almost anything as long as you can have an earbud in. If that sounds interesting to you, head over to audible.com slash Linus and give their monthly membership a try. You get an audiobook with your month, and any audiobooks beyond that one have a fairly hefty discount. So check out audible.com, and I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself. All right guys, comment down below what you thought about this graphics card. Like, dislike the video, subscribe, share, all those kind of things. If you want to jump off YouTube, jump over to linustechtips.com. I'm sure there'll be a forum post about this, which you can probably find in the description of this video if Nick did all those things correctly. Check out newoffice.linustechtips.com if you want to see how the crowdfunding campaign is going, and click the support us button in the top right-ish hand corner of the main website if you want to check out stuff like our Amazon links to give us a little bit of a kickback when you buy things on Amazon. Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you next time.