any idea where i can find a 980ti in lebanon? or when PCandParts will have it available? any estimated price?
Try sending them an email, they usually reply fast
@Anthony2000

ETA in Lebanon is about 2 months - Expected Price for the OC versions will be : 900 - 950 USD (Including VAT). You can grab one with someone coming from UAE like I did - Msi Gtx 980ti Gaming price hovers between 800-830 USD there.
Tech Guru wrote@Anthony2000

ETA in Lebanon is about 2 months - Expected Price for the OC versions will be : 900 - 950 USD (Including VAT). You can grab one with someone coming from UAE like I did - Msi Gtx 980ti Gaming price hovers between 800-830 USD there.
aww man i thought the usual USA price + ~ 100$ + vat ($ 850 ish) may have someone in Dubai...
Anthony2000 wroteTech, you think i should go for 970 SLI?
Go for R9 390 CrossFire, the R9 390 is the new bang-for-buck king. https://youtube.com/watch?v=k9cKZiJw6Pk
If you really want a single card, the Fury X now beats the 980 Ti in most games due to the new Catalyst 15.7 driver, it's launched to optimize AMD cards for Windows 10, it offers an up to 23% boost in performance in Far Cry 4, a 10% boost in GTA V, a 15% boost in Crysis 3 and a 4% boost in performance in FireStrike. The Fury launched today too, it's 549$ and beats the GTX 980 in all games while being just 50$ more expensive. Looks like AMD has cornered Nvidia with those launches.
Anthony2000 wroteany idea where i can find a 980ti in lebanon? or when PCandParts will have it available? any estimated price?
- ASUS GTX 980Ti - 6GDR5 - Price: 920$ T.T.C

You can get one from here
https://www.facebook.com/notes/269912676369810/
the facebook page called :" Republic of gamers store" some are overpriced
but he has some good stuff and claims to ship them directly from north america you can contact him by facebook message
Anthony2000 wroteTech, you think i should go for 970 SLI?
no don't get another one it has memory issues try selling it and getting other cards!
they faced some lawsuits for misleading the consumers with the card not being able to pass the 3.5gb assignment

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-memory-issue-fully-explained/
http://techreport.com/news/27721/nvidia-admits-explains-geforce-gtx-970-memory-allocation-issue
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/199684-nvidia-slapped-with-class-action-lawsuit-over-gtx-970-memory-issues
ghattas.akkad wrote
Anthony2000 wroteTech, you think i should go for 970 SLI?
no don't get another one it has memory issues try selling it and getting other cards!
they faced some lawsuits for misleading the consumers with the card not being able to pass the 3.5gb assignment

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-memory-issue-fully-explained/
http://techreport.com/news/27721/nvidia-admits-explains-geforce-gtx-970-memory-allocation-issue
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/199684-nvidia-slapped-with-class-action-lawsuit-over-gtx-970-memory-issues
Not defending Nvidia but it does have 4GB of VRAM but 512MB run at 1/7th the speed of the rest, hence why it's useless, what's wrong is that they marketed it as a 4GB card instead of a 3.5 + 0.5GB card, they also said it had 64 ROPs and 2MB of L2 cache while they should have said 56 ROPs and 1.75MB of L2 cache. AMD fired many shots over this thing, if AMD did such a mistake Nvidia fanboys would still be talking about four generations laters.
Die_Kapitan wrote
Anthony2000 wroteTech, you think i should go for 970 SLI?
Go for R9 390 CrossFire, the R9 390 is the new bang-for-buck king. https://youtube.com/watch?v=k9cKZiJw6Pk
If you really want a single card, the Fury X now beats the 980 Ti in most games due to the new Catalyst 15.7 driver, it's launched to optimize AMD cards for Windows 10, it offers an up to 23% boost in performance in Far Cry 4, a 10% boost in GTA V, a 15% boost in Crysis 3 and a 4% boost in performance in FireStrike. The Fury launched today too, it's 549$ and beats the GTX 980 in all games while being just 50$ more expensive. Looks like AMD has cornered Nvidia with those launches.
i already have one 970 that's why i am asking if just getting another one would be a good choice. only 390 in lebanon i found was from the ASUS republic of gamers store which ghattas told me about (thanks, knew they had a facebook page, but not that they sell online) But unfortunately his stuff is way overpriced, selling a 390 for 540 dollars when i bought my 970 for 80 dollars less.
Hello guys,
I am not into gaming so i thought i could ask.
Why spend 900usd on a card ? While you could get one for 100 usd and play the same game.
@Anthony2000 @ghattas.akkad @Die_Kapitan

1- Republic of Gamers Store

This is not a "store" rather a Guy named Tarek who has some connections with Asus in the USA / and ship other parts from the USA - no physical store - no stock just shipment of parts & assembling it into desktops. Therefore, RMA is applied in such case and the headache of RMA with its associated costs / time. Plus he adds VAT to his parts; and according to the Lebanese Taxation System a local company is eligible to has a VAT number when its is turnover is 100,000 USD /Year and higher (Service Revenue Turnover and not Net Profit) and he simply has no store or registered company to be eligible for VAT. Simply I do not trust such stores.


2- GTX 970 Dilemma

- Discussing the GTX 970’s memory architecture in more detail. It appears that basic details on the chip were presented incorrectly by Nvidia last year — the core has 1792KB of L2, not 2048KB, and just 56 ROPs, not 64. The 3.5GB / 512MB RAM split, meanwhile, is functioning as intended.

They do deliver 4GB of DDR5 RAM. It doesn't go wrong with more than 3.5GB of RAM. They designed drivers to manage how the RAM is used. The card is still SM-bound and not ROP bound at 56 ROPs nor memory bandwidth bound at 196 GB/s. Yes, they should have released the accurate specifications at launch, but the fact that it scales so similarly to the 980 shows that, when NVIDIA's drivers are in place to use the complicated memory system effectively, the 970 would hardly be helped at all by having those extra ROPs or that extra memory bandwidth, or the extra .5 GB of faster memory. In other words, Consumers were not damaged by the miss information ; as performance wise of the GTX 970. Reason: From My Personal Experience - I have been playing Witcher 3 & GTA 5 on 1440p with 2x Msaa (High/Very High Settings) no significant shuttering who issues that let me click on the quit bottom. (Tried: Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor ; Project cars; Crysis 3 ; Wolfenstein The Old Blood ; Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition; Far Cry ; AC- Unity ; Call of Duty - Advance Warfare on 1440p High/Very High Setting with 2x Msaa or Txaa no major problems - surely if you want to jump to 2160p(4K) high setting shuttering will take place - and frankly this card is not a 4k Card. The benchmarks everyone ran at launch which showed its a screaming card at a great price still stand.Very happy with my 970. It's a screaming card which I got for a great place. Move along now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6k55epUBCE
(Great Benchmark dissecting the problems and mirroring them on actual performance from JaysTwoCents.

3-Is 4 GB Less Future Proof?

For now until to the release of Pascal with HBM 2.0 the risk will be mitigated as we have seen with fury X with 4GB HBM 1.0 which compensated the low Ram on 4K with very high bandwidth (balance scenario) - Therefore the 970/980 with the 4GB are good enough until the the Pascal release (4G of Vram can be risky for 2160P Gaming / High Settings) - more important performance factors will Stream Processors ; Clock Frequency ; Memory Frequency ; Memory Bus Bandwidth etc..

4- 970s SLIs vs One 980Ti

Single 980Ti and 2 SLIs 970 s in the 4K - If you planning to play 2160p for the 980Ti - the 970Sli are faster by 3-4% on average FPS on 4K but there lower FPS are worse than a single 980Ti - reason on 4k (High /Very High Settings) 6GB of Vram is a more secured cushion. I tried both the 980Ti performance on 2160p experience is smoother compared to two 970 SLIs (less shutters & FPS Spikes). But the positive side that I think that DX12, it is supposed to have support for vram stacking so if you do a 970sli, when DX12 comes out you will have 8 GB of Vram ( 7 + 1). For your case I will fo for another 970in SLI and making sure that the PSU is educate enough and wait for the Nvidia Pascale release.

Another Great Benchmark Video of the two from JaysTwoCents


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4RyNNlKbJw
NuclearVision wroteHello guys,
I am not into gaming so i thought i could ask.
Why spend 900usd on a card ? While you could get one for 100 usd and play the same game.
it's hard to explain. first time a built a PC i didn't give a sh$t what settings i run my games or how they looked, i just wanted to be able to run games at a playable FPS for the next 2-3 years. but that changed very quickly lol. kinda becomes like an addiction if i say so myself hahaha

but on a more serious note, you get what you pay for. a 100 dollar graphic card isn't going to get you near the gaming experience that a 900 dollar card can provide. but when gaming becomes your hobby , spending 900 dollars to significantly improve your gaming experience + extend the lifetime of your PC being able to max out games at 60 FPS, is worth it.
Tech Guru wrote2- GTX 970 Dilemma

- Discussing the GTX 970’s memory architecture in more detail. It appears that basic details on the chip were presented incorrectly by Nvidia last year — the core has 1792KB of L2, not 2048KB, and just 56 ROPs, not 64. The 3.5GB / 512MB RAM split, meanwhile, is functioning as intended.

They do deliver 4GB of DDR5 RAM. It doesn't go wrong with more than 3.5GB of RAM. They designed drivers to manage how the RAM is used. The card is still SM-bound and not ROP bound at 56 ROPs nor memory bandwidth bound at 196 GB/s. Yes, they should have released the accurate specifications at launch, but the fact that it scales so similarly to the 980 shows that, when NVIDIA's drivers are in place to use the complicated memory system effectively, the 970 would hardly be helped at all by having those extra ROPs or that extra memory bandwidth, or the extra .5 GB of faster memory. In other words, Consumers were not damaged by the miss information ; as performance wise of the GTX 970. Reason: From My Personal Experience - I have been playing Witcher 3 & GTA 5 on 1440p with 2x Msaa (High/Very High Settings) no significant shuttering who issues that let me click on the quit bottom. (Tried: Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor ; Project cars; Crysis 3 ; Wolfenstein The Old Blood ; Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition; Far Cry ; AC- Unity ; Call of Duty - Advance Warfare on 1440p High/Very High Setting with 2x Msaa or Txaa no major problems - surely if you want to jump to 2160p(4K) high setting shuttering will take place - and frankly this card is not a 4k Card. The benchmarks everyone ran at launch which showed its a screaming card at a great price still stand.Very happy with my 970. It's a screaming card which I got for a great place. Move along now.


3-Is 4 GB Less Future Proof?

For now until to the release of Pascal with HBM 2.0 the risk will be mitigated as we have seen with fury X with 4GB HBM 1.0 which compensated the low Ram on 4K with very high bandwidth (balance scenario) - Therefore the 970/980 with the 4GB are good enough until the the Pascal release (4G of Vram can be risky for 2160P Gaming / High Settings) - more important performance factors will Stream Processors ; Clock Frequency ; Memory Frequency ; Memory Bus Bandwidth etc..
Move along ? That's a major fuck up ad you're telling me to move along, I wouldn't care less no matter how major of a fuck up it was, but I won't move along, that was a major fiasco by Nvidia, and the card's still current generation hardware, you (Nvidia fanboys in general) won't stop talking about the driver issues we had.... 5 years ago. Imagine if AMD did something similar with the 200 series, boy oh boy we wouldn't have stopped hearing Nvidia fanboys even after the launch of the R9 900 series. The GTX 970 is a great card, but it has been marketed wrong all along, hell don't tell me Nvidia didn't know about this shit, yet they still said it has 2MB of L2, 64 ROPs and 4 non-partitioned GB of GDDR5, as a consumer I wouldn't care if the card wonn't use the extra ROPs, cache or VRAM (which it does), I just want the specs said company marketed and sold me the card by saying it has does specs, consumers have been damaged in that respect, they made Nvidia and Gigabyte pay for comsumers a 20% reimbursement . If Nvidia would have been a little more honest there wouldn't have been a fiasco, if Nvidia stepped in from the start and said it has 56 ROPs, 1.75MB of L2 and the VRAM is partitioned, people wouldn't have complained. Shockingly, Nvidia apologized for the mistake while you still defend them for making this mistake. And it does use over 3.5GB of VRAM, and once it does, the framerate that was in the high 60's become low 20's.

Weren't you the one complaining 4GB of VRAM won't be enough ? They're enough for the foreseeable future. There's simply nothing called future proofing, the 8GB for example that the R9 390 series have is to get a better experience at higher resolutions if you go CrossFire. They simply can't put 6GB of VRAM on a 512-bit bus, so they went with the next number that's not 4GB that the 512-bit bus supports.
Die_Kapitan wrote
Tech Guru wrote2- GTX 970 Dilemma

- Discussing the GTX 970’s memory architecture in more detail. It appears that basic details on the chip were presented incorrectly by Nvidia last year — the core has 1792KB of L2, not 2048KB, and just 56 ROPs, not 64. The 3.5GB / 512MB RAM split, meanwhile, is functioning as intended.

They do deliver 4GB of DDR5 RAM. It doesn't go wrong with more than 3.5GB of RAM. They designed drivers to manage how the RAM is used. The card is still SM-bound and not ROP bound at 56 ROPs nor memory bandwidth bound at 196 GB/s. Yes, they should have released the accurate specifications at launch, but the fact that it scales so similarly to the 980 shows that, when NVIDIA's drivers are in place to use the complicated memory system effectively, the 970 would hardly be helped at all by having those extra ROPs or that extra memory bandwidth, or the extra .5 GB of faster memory. In other words, Consumers were not damaged by the miss information ; as performance wise of the GTX 970. Reason: From My Personal Experience - I have been playing Witcher 3 & GTA 5 on 1440p with 2x Msaa (High/Very High Settings) no significant shuttering who issues that let me click on the quit bottom. (Tried: Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor ; Project cars; Crysis 3 ; Wolfenstein The Old Blood ; Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition; Far Cry ; AC- Unity ; Call of Duty - Advance Warfare on 1440p High/Very High Setting with 2x Msaa or Txaa no major problems - surely if you want to jump to 2160p(4K) high setting shuttering will take place - and frankly this card is not a 4k Card. The benchmarks everyone ran at launch which showed its a screaming card at a great price still stand.Very happy with my 970. It's a screaming card which I got for a great place. Move along now.


3-Is 4 GB Less Future Proof?

For now until to the release of Pascal with HBM 2.0 the risk will be mitigated as we have seen with fury X with 4GB HBM 1.0 which compensated the low Ram on 4K with very high bandwidth (balance scenario) - Therefore the 970/980 with the 4GB are good enough until the the Pascal release (4G of Vram can be risky for 2160P Gaming / High Settings) - more important performance factors will Stream Processors ; Clock Frequency ; Memory Frequency ; Memory Bus Bandwidth etc..
Move along ? That's a major fuck up ad you're telling me to move along, I wouldn't care less no matter how major of a fuck up it was, but I won't move along, that was a major fiasco by Nvidia, and the card's still current generation hardware, you (Nvidia fanboys in general) won't stop talking about the driver issues we had.... 5 years ago. Imagine if AMD did something similar with the 200 series, boy oh boy we wouldn't have stopped hearing Nvidia fanboys even after the launch of the R9 900 series. The GTX 970 is a great card, but it has been marketed wrong all along, hell don't tell me Nvidia didn't know about this shit, yet they still said it has 2MB of L2, 64 ROPs and 4 non-partitioned GB of GDDR5, as a consumer I wouldn't care if the card wonn't use the extra ROPs, cache or VRAM (which it does), I just want the specs said company marketed and sold me the card by saying it has does specs, consumers have been damaged in that respect, they made Nvidia and Gigabyte pay for comsumers a 20% reimbursement . If Nvidia would have been a little more honest there wouldn't have been a fiasco, if Nvidia stepped in from the start and said it has 56 ROPs, 1.75MB of L2 and the VRAM is partitioned, people wouldn't have complained. Shockingly, Nvidia apologized for the mistake while you still defend them for making this mistake. And it does use over 3.5GB of VRAM, and once it does, the framerate that was in the high 60's become low 20's.

Weren't you the one complaining 4GB of VRAM won't be enough ? They're enough for the foreseeable future. There's simply nothing called future proofing, the 8GB for example that the R9 390 series have is to get a better experience at higher resolutions if you go CrossFire. They simply can't put 6GB of VRAM on a 512-bit bus, so they went with the next number that's not 4GB that the 512-bit bus supports.
Well, I am a fan of Nvidia they have good technology but no one can deny that the gtx970 release was a major failure especially the Nvidia's companies reaction to the filed lawsuit still denying what they've done nothing wrong!

AMD launched a great deal for users who bought the card and offered them an exchange offer.

Nvidia is a great company with advanced technology but I don't trust their marketing ads and reviews anymore and I don't trust buying their product before reading solid user and overclockers reviews

and as for the AMD it is great but with poorer marketing campaigns especially in video games where mostly all video games on launch has the nvidia logo and screen flashing first showing it runs best on Nvidia plus AMD is a bit openSource where Nvidia is not
ghattas.akkad wroteWell, I am a fan of Nvidia they have good technology but no one can deny that the gtx970 release was a major failure especially the Nvidia's companies reaction to the filed lawsuit still denying what they've done nothing wrong!

AMD launched a great deal for users who bought the card and offered them an exchange offer.

Nvidia is a great company with advanced technology but I don't trust their marketing ads and reviews anymore and I don't trust buying their product before reading solid user and overclockers reviews

and as for the AMD it is great but with poorer marketing campaigns especially in video games where mostly all video games on launch has the nvidia logo and screen flashing first showing it runs best on Nvidia plus AMD is a bit openSource where Nvidia is not
Compare how much money AMD has and how much money Nvidia has, and AMD has still been the one that innovates the most, they're leading the push towards VR gaming, they were always the first to use new memory standards, first cards to use both GDDR5 and HBM were AMDs, they push towards open source, just look at FreeSync, exact same thing that G-Sync does, but the cheapest FreeSync 1440p monitor is 449$, the cheapest G-Sync one is 729$, just because of an unneeded chip.

Open source Linux AMD drivers are unmatched will Nvidia's open source Linux driver are non-existent. Nvidia has the money to pay developers just to use GameWorks for the sole purpose of making AMD cards look bad because "they can't run the game at max settings without having huge framerate drops", AMD doesn't have that library of features that developers can use because they're too lazy to take a few more months and to make games have equal performance on all cards, AMD simply cannot do this, they don't have the capital and they're trying to win the market by being good guys. Of course AMD are no angels and demand profit, but the "fuck you" said to the consumer is more subtle than Nvidia's shouting of "fuck you" to the consumer.

AMD beats Nvidia in the bang-for-buck section, the most important of them all, but Nvidia has a rather excellent marketing scheme of getting the consumer to their side, mostly based on old lies (and new ones too), like:
-Power Usage, I mean who gives a damn about power usage ? People are fooled to think that they'll pay 100$ a month more if they go AMD instead of Nvidia;
-Drivers, AMD had some problems in the drivers a few years ago but now they're fixed, AMD's drivers have been pretty close to Nvidia's and have been rather excellent in improving performance, scaling and optimization in games;
-Heat: AMD has some shitty reference coolers but there's no need to go full retard on this, Nvidia's blower coolers aren't that good either, if you get any non-reference card from any AMD board partner, you'll get a card that's as quiet and cool as any Nvidia card on the market;

We as consumers, should be relieved that AMD exists, you don't want to wait 5 years just to get marginally better performance while paying 600$ for something like the GTX 960. AMD is coming back, and the 400 series are gonna be a big hit, as AMD seems to be stepping away from their "Patience is a Virtue" bullshit (which is kinda strange as their new CPUs are called Zen) and are trying to regain their share of the market and to prove they still exist.
Efficiency is the first. Nvidia has pursued architecture updates aggressively and more quickly placed them in products while AMD, strapped for resources as it tries to compete in both CPU and GPU realms, has fallen back on re-branding existing chips in many of its cards.

The result of this strategy is apparent in power draw. AMD’s R9 290X, a single-GPU powerhouse, has a thermal design power of 250 watts, while the quicker GeForce GTX 980 fits within a 165-watt envelope. The GTX Titan X, meanwhile needs as much power as the R9 290X but is at least 50 percent quicker in most benchmarks. That means Nvidia hardware is cooler and quieter. Gamers may be willing to put up with a card that sounds like a box fan, but most prefer peace if it’s an option.

Features are the second point of difference. Nvidia has consistently rolled out new software and drivers including GeForce Experience, an easy-to-use driver update utility, and ShadowPlay game recording. The green team was also first to embrace frame synchronization with G-Sync, though AMD is catching up with its more open alternative FreeSync. There are some advantages on the red side of the fence, like a very aggressive game bundling program called “Never Settle,” but Nvidia is winning the features war.

At the root, AMD’s problem is everything. It’s suffering across the board, losing money and important staff at a startling rate. The company’s revenue in 2014 was $5.5 billion. That’s a billion more than Nvidia, but the green team isn’t spread as thin and doesn’t compete directly with Intel. That’s probably why AMD lost over $400 million in 2014, while Nvidia made over $400 million in the same period.

If trends continue, and what I am from the rigs being seen at least installed in Lebanon , the majority of gaming setups on the desktops are an Intel processor with an Nvidia video card in edition with Gaming Laptops.

Frankly to be very transparent and objective with my assessment I do own benchmarks and not rely on websites benchmarks /Youtube / etc.. - I will have the Fury X next week and will put it head to head with my recent 980Ti / 970 SLI and experience whether it actually worth it or no - for a shift from NVidia to AMD ; the problem is when the AMD introduced the 390/390x - the market was already saturated with 970 / 980s which give similar gaming experience in general ( 3-4 Fps from here and there will not jeopardize the over all experience) - Especially with the high performance/price ratio of the 970 ; back also NVidia introduced the 980Ti - 4K gaming enthusiasts went and pick it since it matches the Titan X performance with half the price - then AMD introduced the Fury X and in both scenarios AMD was late to the game. Branding shifting the very difficult from NVidia to AMD and will always be ; Hoping that AMD will go into the competition more when an aggressive line of CPUs and GPUs that will compete with the Coming Skylake and Pascal.
Tech Guru wroteEfficiency is the first. Nvidia has pursued architecture updates aggressively and more quickly placed them in products while AMD, strapped for resources as it tries to compete in both CPU and GPU realms, has fallen back on re-branding existing chips in many of its cards.

The result of this strategy is apparent in power draw. AMD’s R9 290X, a single-GPU powerhouse, has a thermal design power of 250 watts, while the quicker GeForce GTX 980 fits within a 165-watt envelope. The GTX Titan X, meanwhile needs as much power as the R9 290X but is at least 50 percent quicker in most benchmarks. That means Nvidia hardware is cooler and quieter. Gamers may be willing to put up with a card that sounds like a box fan, but most prefer peace if it’s an option.

Features are the second point of difference. Nvidia has consistently rolled out new software and drivers including GeForce Experience, an easy-to-use driver update utility, and ShadowPlay game recording. The green team was also first to embrace frame synchronization with G-Sync, though AMD is catching up with its more open alternative FreeSync. There are some advantages on the red side of the fence, like a very aggressive game bundling program called “Never Settle,” but Nvidia is winning the features war.

At the root, AMD’s problem is everything. It’s suffering across the board, losing money and important staff at a startling rate. The company’s revenue in 2014 was $5.5 billion. That’s a billion more than Nvidia, but the green team isn’t spread as thin and doesn’t compete directly with Intel. That’s probably why AMD lost over $400 million in 2014, while Nvidia made over $400 million in the same period.

If trends continue, and what I am from the rigs being seen at least installed in Lebanon , the majority of gaming setups on the desktops are an Intel processor with an Nvidia video card in edition with Gaming Laptops.

Frankly to be very transparent and objective with my assessment I do own benchmarks and not rely on websites benchmarks /Youtube / etc.. - I will have the Fury X next week and will put it head to head with my recent 980Ti / 970 SLI and experience whether it actually worth it or no - for a shift from NVidia to AMD ; the problem is when the AMD introduced the 390/390x - the market was already saturated with 970 / 980s which give similar gaming experience in general ( 3-4 Fps from here and there will not jeopardize the over all experience) - Especially with the high performance/price ratio of the 970 ; back also NVidia introduced the 980Ti - 4K gaming enthusiasts went and pick it since it matches the Titan X performance with half the price - then AMD introduced the Fury X and in both scenarios AMD was late to the game. Branding shifting the very difficult from NVidia to AMD and will always be ; Hoping that AMD will go into the competition more when an aggressive line of CPUs and GPUs that will compete with the Coming Skylake and Pascal.
to be fair, Skylake looks like sh*t as of now, barely 5 % improvement over haswell. but Skylake refresh just might be promising. totally stoked about pascal though, looks awesome, but not enough details to jump to the conclusion that it is going to double GPU performance for the same price like a lot of people are saying. only time will tell...
Tech Guru wroteEfficiency is the first. Nvidia has pursued architecture updates aggressively and more quickly placed them in products while AMD, strapped for resources as it tries to compete in both CPU and GPU realms, has fallen back on re-branding existing chips in many of its cards.

The result of this strategy is apparent in power draw. AMD’s R9 290X, a single-GPU powerhouse, has a thermal design power of 250 watts, while the quicker GeForce GTX 980 fits within a 165-watt envelope. The GTX Titan X, meanwhile needs as much power as the R9 290X but is at least 50 percent quicker in most benchmarks. That means Nvidia hardware is cooler and quieter. Gamers may be willing to put up with a card that sounds like a box fan, but most prefer peace if it’s an option.

Features are the second point of difference. Nvidia has consistently rolled out new software and drivers including GeForce Experience, an easy-to-use driver update utility, and ShadowPlay game recording. The green team was also first to embrace frame synchronization with G-Sync, though AMD is catching up with its more open alternative FreeSync. There are some advantages on the red side of the fence, like a very aggressive game bundling program called “Never Settle,” but Nvidia is winning the features war.
If there's something AMD has that Nvidia lacks it's that their architecture has pretty much remained competitive without changing much about it, GCN is still rolling and it's better than ever. Rebranding isn't the same as refreshing, the 300 series is a refresh, AMD modified the cards, they didn't just change the name on the box and slap a new cooler, the chip is not the same, it uses less power at stock clocks, performs better at similar clocks, has more VRAM and overclocks better than the 200 series. The 290X was on par with the GTX 970, the 390X is neck-to-neck with the GTX 980, if it was just a rebrand, such increase in performance would be impossible.

Stop taking the AMD reference cooler as an example, Sapphire's Tri-X and Vapor-X, PowerColor's PCS+ and TurboDuo, XFX DD, HIS IceQ and Club3D's RoyalQueen, RoyalKing and RoyalAce are as cool and quiet as Nvidia's non-reference cards and rarely go over 65 degrees. Most consumers don't care about power usage, they just want a card that works and has good price-to-performance. Your argument is pointless.

Features you say ? AMD Gaming Evolved, need I say more ? It optimizes your games' settings, and allows you to record gameplay. FreeSync is better due to the sole reason of it being the same as G-Sync while being cheaper. Never Settle Forever is a great program that actually lets you choose which games you want, it doesn't have the latest and greatest games but AMD still have some great games, Civilization Beyond Earth and Star Citizen anyone ? Nvidia winning the features war is, again, based on your very shallow knowledge of AMD software, or your ancient (circa-4000 series) knowledge of ATi software.
it looks like pcandparts has the gtx980ti you have to send an email thought requesting a quotation

"Asus GTX980TI-6GD5 GeForce GTX 980Ti 6GB GDDR5 Link Email"