same goes for rog swift lol . But those two are the best choice at the moment 

But I'm going to be frank with everyone here, the 3.5GB vram thing? It's not an issue. Honestly, it's been blown out of propotion. Stop looking at just numbers and charts, they cannot tell the whole story.

I'm not going to disagree that 980Ti isn't a great card for 1080p, but it makes very little sense to buy a 980Ti to play at 1080p, 144hz (with or without Gsync). Paying a little more for a 1440p panel makes quite a significant difference, have some extra cash laying around and getting a 4k Gysnc monitor is seriously a whole new experience.

this is correct.

the performance is as it is, when people buy the card, it's bought for the performance.

Having 3.5GB doesn't make it lose performance, just some people aren't happy to feel "cheated".

Technically Nvidia isn't wrong because it is 3.5GB + 0.5GB so total is still 4GB.
Why not? Practically every game will run above 60 fps on GTX 980 Ti even with settings set to the max.

If the person uses 1080p all the way then it'll last for ages.

Once gone to 4K, slap on another GTX 980 Ti. That'll be sweet.

just won a lucky draw 980TI HOF today at orange estadium

thanks to Galax Malaysia...still drooling till now  

yeah, its one of those odd releases that doesnt seem to have anywhere to fit in

its suffering from the "<Insert nex gen> is near, wait it out longer" syndrome

on the bright side of going consumer than Extreme series, you save alot from not getting LGA2011 board

Skylake at least had the decency to support DDR3L instead of pure DDR4

But hey, cheapest LGA2011V3 is a Hexacores, while the 1.4k i7 is still a Quadcores.

Mobo wise, LGA2012V3 is expect to last at least another year, while H97/Z97 pretty much EOL by this year end.

If you are rich enough to invest on high end i7 (consumer) and Z97, the Haswell-E combination is just marginally pricier while significantly more "future proof" as compared to the consumer counterpart.

just won a lucky draw 980TI HOF today at orange estadium

thanks to Galax Malaysia...still drooling till now  

NVIDIA AIBs Silently Cut Prices on High-End Maxwell Cards
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-aibs-silently-c...29-gtx-980-479/
 

Got the asus sli bridge for second rig. Upgrading its ssd while at it. Cheap man. Massive drop in prices from corsair
Decided main rig will get evga pro v2 bridge. Currently using evga pro v1 on it.

this is correct.

the performance is as it is, when people buy the card, it's bought for the performance.

Having 3.5GB doesn't make it lose performance, just some people aren't happy to feel "cheated".

Technically Nvidia isn't wrong because it is 3.5GB + 0.5GB so total is still 4GB.
Why not? Practically every game will run above 60 fps on GTX 980 Ti even with settings set to the max.

If the person uses 1080p all the way then it'll last for ages.

Once gone to 4K, slap on another GTX 980 Ti. That'll be sweet.

Can't disagree with that. GTX 980 Ti handles 1440p 144 G-sync comfortably.

glad to hear that. now for a new monitor... any recommendation for 1440p 144 g sync monitor ? cheapest to most exp.  TN or IPS

But I'm going to be frank with everyone here, the 3.5GB vram thing? It's not an issue. Honestly, it's been blown out of propotion. Stop looking at just numbers and charts, they cannot tell the whole story.

Concluding

Our product reviews in the past few months and its conclusion are not any different opposed to everything that has happened in the past few days, the product still performans similar to what we have shown you as hey .. it is in fact the same product. The clusterfuck that Nvidia dropped here is simple, they have not informed the media or their customers about the memory partitioning and the challenges they face. Overall you will have a hard time pushing any card over 3.5 GB of graphics memory usage with any game unless you do some freaky stuff. The ones that do pass 3.5 GB mostly are poor console ports or situations where you game in Ultra HD or DSR Ultra HD rendering. In that situation I cannot guarantee that your overall experience will be trouble free, however we have a hard time detecting and replicating the stuttering issues some people have mentioned.


The Bottom line

Utilizing graphics memory after 3.5 GB can result into performance issues as the card needs to manage some really weird stuff in memory, it's nearly load-balancing. But fact remains it seems to be handling that well, it’s hard to detect and replicate oddities. If you unequivocally refuse to accept the situation at hand, you really should return your card and pick a Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 980. However, if you decide to upgrade to a GTX 980, you will be spending more money and thus rewarding Nvidia for it. Until further notice our recommendation on the GeForce GTX 970 stands as it was, for the money it is an excellent performer. But it should have been called a 3.5 GB card with a 512MB L3 GDDR5 cache buffer.