Extreme Pbr Nexus Free Download

[Kimbery Challacombe]

Butthat's jumping the gun. Our introductions are normally a bit more gradual. The GTX 980 Extreme was unveiled to us at Game24, where we filmed our first hands-on with the 970 version of the product. The Extreme is being made in limited quantity and at higher cost to the consumer, specifically with an emphasis on a high overclocking ceiling and a legitimately impressive cooler. Zotac's GTX 980 Extreme was the video card slated to put the company on the map. The cooler, in theory, should be able to handle serious heat and allow for sufficient VRM cooling that high-voltage overclocks should be sustainable, especially with a hand-binned GM204 chip.

The video card also lists an MSRP of $610, matched against the reference GTX 980 (built by nVidia) pricing of $550. The same issues we'll detail herein cascade down the entire Zotac Omega and Extreme lineup, including the 1.212v cap problem. The GTX 970 does not escape Zotac's engineering failures unless purchasing the unmodified reference model built by nVidia.

But a higher base clock doesn't really mean anything. It means that it'll sell better to users who are doing a numbers-vs-numbers comparison between cards on retail sites, I suppose, but that's about it. A lower clock gives more room for overclockers to play and fine-tune, anyway, so it's really unnecessary if purchasing the card with overclocking in mind.

Zotac uses a lot of marketing terminology that gets confusing to enumerate. There's IceStorm, FireStorm, OC Plus (OC+), Power Boost, and Exo Armor. Because this doesn't tell you anything useful, here's the break-down:

IceStorm: Zotac's aftermarket cooling solution (see competing ACX, Twin Frozr, etc.). IceStorm uses a triple-fan design, built around a single, central intake fan with two flanking exhaust fans. The exhaust fans ensure that the air is pulled through the heatsink and pushed out of the card to allow more rapid thermal dissipation. Out of all the aspects of the card, this is the one that we were most excited by; the cooler's design is legitimately promising and should allow a high overclock on air, if the rest of the card measured up.

Exo Armor: This is just a backplate. Unlike the reference design, there is no ability to remove chunks of the backplate to allow better airflow in SLI configurations. The backplate has a nifty carbon fiber look to it, though.

I suppose I'll take a moment to point out Zotac's LED system, too. The card has green (idle) and red (load) LEDs that activate based upon GPU activity and demand. It's unfortunate that the LEDs only light downward and are not user-changeable to different colors, but that's a small gripe when matched to the looming concerns. If nothing else, the LEDs can mercifully be disabled through FireStorm.

My excitement gave way to genuine confusion and concern when I found that I couldn't overclock the GTX 980 Extreme as well as my reference model. The overclock had a low ceiling due to severe voltage limitations.

Breaking into BIOS with Kepler BIOS Tweaker unveils voltage limitations that are a bit frightening, to include a locked 1.212v GPU vCore maximum overvoltage. The reference GTX 980 is capable of 1.256v; that extra headroom is enough to make a world of difference in high overclocks and stability. Note that ASUS' Strix and EVGA's OC units were originally capped at 1.212v also, but neither pushes the extreme OC narrative (or extreme price) that Zotac has advertised.

So we contacted Zotac. This was recapped in the stop-gap article I wrote about this issue. It should be first stated that the company's US PR and marketing team did everything in its power to address my admonishment and insistence that the video card should be better; there's only so much the US team can do before relying upon the overseas team's developers to deliver solutions, though. And even then, there's only so much that team can do before realizing that preliminary engineering has doomed the product from the start.

I told them that BIOS needed an update. Users should be able to at least match the voltage of reference, if not exceed it, I'd insisted. I further argued that the total % TDP of the card (+10% over base TDP) should be increased to allow for additional power as the voltage is increased. This, of course, assumed that the company fixed voltage cap issues, because they'd rapidly run into TDP cap issues. The Zotac card is built to handle the extra power and should be able to cool itself, but there were deeper electrical issues at play; I hadn't realized this yet, though.

And I gave a preview above as to why, but there's more. FireStorm not only misreports clocks with great unpredictability, it lies regularly about voltage and doesn't even apply the mV OV set by the user. See the below screenshot:

We don't even have voltage readings part of the time, and when we do have them, overvolts do nothing. Literally nothing. It moves a bar on the screen. This is all shown in my video on page 1. Sometimes FireStorm actually does report that voltage increases, but it's impossible to validate that through third-party solutions, according to Zotac. We just have to trust FireStorm.

Fact-checking with GPU-z only further underlines all of these concerns. In overclocking, as you'll find out below, GPU-z never reported higher than 1.20v even when the FireStorm software exceeded this number (remember: This is the only software we can use to meet 1.26v). We even had a special internal-only version of the tool that allowed up to 1.6v, but that still didn't work. Zotac told us in an email that GPU-z could not be used to accurately measure the voltage output and that we'd have to rely on FireStorm. This lack of GPU-z support is because GPU-z reads from vBIOS, which is locked to 1.212v.

The last two weeks have had enough back-and-forth that trust with the software development team is growing thin, but let's assume it is true: How, as a third-party reviewer, am I supposed to reliably gather reporting metrics that are accurate and trusted without using a third-party utility to check Zotac's work? I wouldn't be so concerned with this if FireStorm actually applied the voltage I asked it to. Or if FireStorm could apply a new voltage after being reset without requiring a software restart. Or if FireStorm would show me voltage at all without requiring a system reboot half the time.

Based strictly on my own tear-down and voltage testing of the card, it appears that the VRM is weaker than the reference solution. It is our pure speculation that Zotac cut corners to either rush the device to market (ahead of spec) or lower costs of production, potentially complicated by the custom PCB built for the Extreme (which sees use in other models, too).

When pressed on the low voltage, Zotac's PM team told us that they were trying to limit RMAs (warranty fulfillment) by locking voltage; then they told us that their software would unlock the voltage with OC Plus, which immediately invalidated the previous statement. Think about that cognitive dissonance: We're limiting warranties by restricting voltage unless you use our software that you're forced and encouraged to use, in which case you can overvolt it higher.

I had difficulty determining what was going on behind the scenes: Either Zotac has grossly incompetent engineers and product managers, was lying to me, is deeply embarrassed, jumped the gun and is now paying for it, or a mix of all these options.

The sad thing is that we haven't even gotten to the other concerns yet, like the tremendous size of the GTX 980 Extreme, which effectively consumes 2.5 expansion slots internally. This makes SLI a bit tight and eliminates other expansion options, depending on how close your PCI-e slots are on the board.

Each device was tested using the latest AMD and nVidia drivers (344.16). Overclocking was gradually stepped-up and tested for stability between each major increment, using FireStrike Extreme on loop for stability testing. FireStrike Extreme was also used for more strenuous OC benchmarking. We ended up skipping SLI overclock performance testing with the 980 Extreme due to all the other concerns and the tremendous time invested up until this point.

Our standard test methodology applies here. For thermal benchmarking, we deployed FurMark (issues exhibited with boost CLK) & FireStrike Extreme to place the GPU under load while logging thermals with HW Monitor+ and GPU-z. FurMark executed its included 1080p burn-in test for this synthetic thermal benchmarking. In FPS and game benchmark performance testing, we used the following titles:

FRAPS was used to log frametime and framerate performance during a 120 second session. FRAFS was used for analysis. Tests were conducted three times for parity. GPU-z logged boost clocks, checked the ASIC quality, and extracted BIOS; Kepler BIOS Tweaker analyzed BIOS for limitations.

The system was kept in a constant thermal environment (21C - 22C at all times) while under test. 4x4GB memory modules were kept overclocked at 2133MHz. All case fans were set to 100% speed and automated fan control settings were disabled for purposes of test consistency and thermal stability.

Overclocking Maxwell is a bit different from the experience with Kepler. Without diving into deeper hardmods or LN2 overclocking, most users will be pretty happy playing around with the TDP % (extra power over TDP), clock frequency offset, memory frequency offset, and GPU vCore. Some software offers memory voltage offset, which can be useful for more extreme overclocks.

With Maxwell and Boost 2.0 (you can disable Boost 2.0), the clock will modulate based upon thermal and power concerns and demand. If the video card is unable to allocate more power for a higher voltage (V=IR), the overclock will fail and/or the GPU will downclock. Increasing the power target % from 100% to 125% gives us an extra 25% more power (headroom) to play with overclocking.

Zotac's GTX 980 Extreme, on the other hand, could not exceed a +108MHz OC (over a higher base, mind you) at 111% power with a 325MHz memory OC. The result was a 1525.9MHz boost clock, a full 34.4MHz lower than reference. We were able to sustain this with a 6mV overvoltage, but unfortunately could not push anything beyond this point. The OV was applied using other software when FireStorm seemed to exhibit issues. Pushing even a single digit beyond this point resulted in flickering, tearing, and driver failures.

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