The GTX 980 Ti was released eight months ago and since then we have seen numerous custom designs which range from the absolutely insane to the more mundane. Regardless of NVIDIA's board partners? efforts, the number of new products using the GM200 core has leveled off since the architecture is nearing the end of its lifespan. While not entirely close at hand, both Pascal and AMD's competing Polaris architectures are about six months away (granted, a lifetime in PC market time) so for the most part everyone is just digging in with their current product stacks.

This situation has led to a bit of stagnation but also some interesting price fluctuations with custom, overclocked cards routinely going for less than NVIDIA's $649USD reference MSRP. Naturally, with the falling loonie we here in Canada are staring down the barrel of $900+ price points for these cards but there's not much to be done about that.

Mentioning price provides us with a perfect introduction to Gigabyte's GTX 980 Ti Gaming. While this is an overclocked and heavily upgraded version of the GTX 980 Ti, it routinely sells for about $650USD or not a dime more than NVIDIA's reference cards. Gigabyte has also effectively undercut several of their competitors like EVGA's GTX 980 Ti Superclocked, ASUS? GTX 980 TI STRIX OC and even MSI's similarly-named GTX 980 TI Gaming 6G. They seem to have injected some much-needed value into what many believe to be a heavily over-priced segment.