14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA may have basically killed a fair bit of the hype that the Maxwell micro-architecture could have accrued this year, up to the actual product release, but that didn't stop it from launching two truly good video cards. One of which has now been adopted by iBuyPower.
This happened all of last week really. That a maker of boutique pre-configure gaming PCs would take one or both of NVIDIA's new video boards and install them inside one or more of their systems.
We saw it with Syber, CyberPowerPC, Maingear, Velocity Micro, and Origin PC. Now, iBuyPower is adding its name to the list.
The company has installed the GeForce GTX 980 inside its 2014 Paladin E, the Gamer Paladin D980, and the Weekly Gamer Special.
These computers have starting prices of $1,129 / €1,129, $1,499 / €1,499, and $1,639 / €1,639, respectively.
The GeForce GTX 980
As NVIDIA explained on Friday, the video board is powered by the GM204-400 graphics processing unit, with 2,048 CUDA cores, 64 ROPs, 128 TMUs, and a memory interface of 256 bits.
The VRAM amount is of 4 GB GDDR5, while the clock speeds are of 1,126 MHz base GPU, 1,216 MHz GPU Boost, and 7 GHz for the memory.
Hardware-wise, the card has some disadvantages compared to the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, powered by Kepler.
However, the newcomer makes up for it with a much smaller TDP (165W instead of 250W) and by basically beating GTX 780 Ti in most games and benchmarks anyway (according to reviews, or at least some of them). The Maxwell GPU also has a much smaller die size than GK110 (398 square mm instead of 561).
Finally, the new Maxwell GPUs have some cool new technologies, like Voxel Global Illumination, which enhances and accelerates dynamic lighting effects. iBuyPower specifically emphasized this in its announcement.
The iBuyPower gaming systems
They have everything you'd expect from this kind of computer: spacious insides, support for multiple GPU configurations, both solid state and magnetic storage (including SSD+HDD combos), advanced cooling (even water-based), and various ways of making the system look as good as it runs (LED-lit fans, side windows, front panel embellishments, etc.).
All three computers are available for configuration and order immediately. The Weekly gamer Special is the one with the highest potential performance, unsurprisingly enough. In no small part because it uses Intel's new Haswell-E CPUs and DDR4 memory (8GB DDR4-2400).
