NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti is currently in an odd position . After AMD launched their R9 Fury X and subsequently more affordable R9 Fury, many expected the battle for high end GPU supremacy to heat up in a big way. That didn't happen. Instead of staling sales from their GeForce competitors, the new AMD cards have actually pushed buyers towards the GTX 980 Ti and to a lesser extent the GTX 980. A lot of this has been due to a lack of stock for many of AMD's top-end SKUs. As a result, NVIDIA and their board partners are scrambling to meet the bonanza in demand by increasing production capacity and continuing to launch class-leading custom designs.

One of the latest and also most anticipated releases is ASUS? GTX 980 Ti STRIX OC, a graphics card that seemingly has everything but isn't all that much more expensive than a reference card. At $669 it is $30 less expensive than the balls-to-the-wall Zotac AMP! Extreme and slightly less than MSI's GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G and EVGA's GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+. That is, if you can actually find it these days.

One thing we should also mention straight off the bat is the slight controversy that surrounded this card shortly after its launch and initial reviews. Some sites received a higher clocked non-retail version while cards destined for store shelves were supposed to be clocked a bit lower. Our sample is straight from the retail channel so the clock speeds you see below are the ones that customers STRIX OC cards come equipped with.