 Back at PAX East in March, I said I was intrigued by the release of the GTX 980 Kingpin from EVGA due to the announcement of the Titan X. There was a lot of discussion in the comments as to whether or not this card would end up being worth it compared to the potential price increase of said Titan X. Well, now the Titan X has been out for a while. Let's see how it stacks up. Intel's new 750 series SSDs utilize the NVMe standard, providing speeds we've never seen before on consumer storage drives. Click now to learn more. First up, we have the card's mojo, its performance hardware. EVGA's front-running GTX 980 is rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 Coup de corps equipped GM204 chip, and the GTX 980 is rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 Coup de corps equipped GM204 chip, and the GTX 980 is rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 Coup de corps equipped GM204 chip, and the GTX 980 is rocking a stock base clock speed for the 2048 Coup de corps equipped GM204 chip of 1304, and a boost clock of 1418. EVGA has increased the standard setup of 4GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory by 10MHz, resulting in an effective 7,010MHz compared to the reference card's 7,000MHz. The unboxing experience of a kingpin card is usually quite awesome, and this was no exception. It came solidly packed with beautiful foam all over the place to the point that I could actually repurpose this for keeping other cards safe and nice in the future. For standard accessories, if you have a driver DVD which you can throw away, because you can just download it from the Nvidia website, a multi-language manual, an OC guide, and a whole bunch of other pamphlets and papers and whatnot. It also included a small army of adapters, including mini-displayport to full-displayport, mini-displayport to HDMI, mini-displayport to DVI, VGA to DVI, dual-molex to 6-pin, and 8-pin to dual-6-pin. The kingpin is massive, as it should be, standing a fair amount taller than the rest of our other reference-style GPUs. The backplate is absolutely beautiful and should fit in amongst basically any design scheme, and even has little cutouts to feature some of the badass-looking hardware on the back. Also, you may notice that it mostly calls itself classified all over the cooler, but never fear, there's a little cutout on said backplate revealing the kingpin branding on the PCB. Now, EVGA expects people to be interested in water-cooling this card, and because of that, they did something that may seem a little weird at first, but it's actually really cool. Taking a look at the I.O., you can see there's a DVI port, an HDMI port, and three mini-displayports, and nope, that's it. No full-size displayport. And specifically, all of these are on one line, which is awesome, because if you water-cool this card, you can turn it into a true single-slot card due to no I.O. being on the second row. Freaking cool. The cooler features dual 100mm double ball-bearing fans with 11 blades each just above an extremely large heatsink rocking five massive straight heatpipes and one bendy one. It features EVGA's memory and MOSFET cooling plate plus, which they claim will reduce memory temperature by up to 7 degrees Celsius and MOSFET temps by up to 8 degrees Celsius. The MMCP comes in two pieces, so if you plan on cooling the GPU directly, you can continue to use the MOSFET cooling part of it. A nice touch. EVGA claims that their ACX 2.0 cooler will perform 26% cooler and 36% quieter than a reference card, and in our testing, it was able to impressively keep this card at a relatively cool 70 degrees while overclocked and under heavy load. We still 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 very annoying and it was relatively quiet all the time. Yes, that was essentially the same result that we had with the classified 980, which is unsurprising, as it's essentially the same cooler. This is beastly enough that EVGA has the fans not even running while it's below 60 degrees straight from the factory. If you want to learn how to do this on your own, check out Linus's video here. The Kingpin takes two 8-pin power connectors and one 6-pin power connector, along with a beastly 14-plus-3 phase fully digital VRM sitting on top of a super solid 12-layer PCB. If that wasn't enough for you, they also have a 3-stage BIOS switch, including normal, overclocking mode, an LN2 mode, along with thermal sensors, onboard voltage checkpoints, EVBOT support, and obviously, the most important thing. Full LED color control, allowing you to color match it to whatever your build theme may be. Just before we get into the performance section, I'd like to remind you guys of a few little nice tech pieces that NVIDIA has left inside, including things like SLI, CUDA, and GeForce Experience, and all the new stuff that was introduced with the GTX 980, like MFAA, Dynamic Super Resolution, and Delta Color Compression, which you can learn more about in Linus's original 980 launch video by clicking here or possibly even here. Overclocking the Kingpin was definitely more interesting than a reference 980, as there was a lot more power and thermal headroom to play with. I hooked up a multimeter to the voltage checkpoints and used EVGA's classified voltage tool to increase voltages to an actual of 1.35 volts, which resulted in a lot more available power, while maintaining a wonderfully low temperature of 70 degrees Celsius and a power readout of 385. Landing this card between a reference 980 and a Titan X in terms of power, which is exactly what I expected. After setting the BIOS to overclocking mode, I cranked the power limit up and increased the core clock by an offset of 135 and the memory clock by 200. You can check out all the settings for this card and other cards in the overclocking dock linked in the description down below. There was also no surprises in terms of performance. It edged out the 290X Vapor X and left a fair gap between itself and the reference 980, but still trailed by quite a bit when compared to the front running Titan X. Also, something to note here, if you didn't watch a performance review of Grand Theft Auto V, is that while both these teams did release a driver specifically for this game, it seems to favor the green team quite a bit, so keep that in mind when looking at these numbers. In conclusion, this card is quiet, cold, and powerful. A great combination. Is it worth it? Well, technically, if you're going for performance per dollar, no, but you shouldn't really be looking at a kingpin card if you're going strictly for performance per dollar anyways, so I'll say it definitely depends. I could see this card bridging the gap for some people. To go from here to a Titan X, it would cost you about $250 to $300, plus or minus a lot depending on your region. So if it's in the budget, for sure, go for a Titan X. But if you want a bit more than a 980, but don't quite have the budget for a Titan X, which isn't surprising as a Titan X costs more than my first car, this may be the card for you. Alright guys, do you guys think this card slots well between a 980 and a Titan X? Well, it is a 980, so above a reference 980 and a Titan X? Let me know in the comments down below. Like, dislike, subscribe, share, follow any other buttons that might be around the video. In the description, you can see things like cool Linus Tech Tips shirts. I think we're finally going to have an actual Linus Tech Tips branded one soon, so that could be cool. Also in the description, you can see the overclocking dock and various other things. Over on the forum, you can comment there and I'll have a much higher likeliness of actually reading it. 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