You can't just look at 1 review site for noise level testing. Look at 10-20 sites and what do you see? 980Ti is hot and loud. Nearly every 980Ti owner has admitted to the same on our very boards from personal user experience. You can mention coil whine against some Fury X samples, or pump noise, sure, but a reference 980Ti blower is not quiet. I hope for Pascal NV brings out AIO CLC as that would be a monster card. No more blower cards from me, probably ever.
Also, did you actually listen to the videos of the cards?
Even if we take Fury X out of the picture, who in their right mind would buy a reference blower 980Ti and give up 18-20% overclocking performance at quiet noise levels against after-market 980Ti cards? There are only 4 users who fit this: (1) Tri- or Quad-SLI users (2) Guys putting waterblocks on a reference 980Ti (3) Gamers who only game with headphones (or have bad hearing) (4) Users with the smallest cases there a blower is required but in that case Fury X is even better.
I bet he is not. This is probably a strategic move to cater to your readership and marketing $. Small sites like PCPer and HardOCP rely much more on marketing money and ad clicks than a large site like AT that reviews a much greater variety of products, not just PC parts. With 80% of NV's customers and NV having much more influence, the more GW titles he includes, the more he hypes up NV, the better it is for his site's membership and NV review perks, etc.
Hexus shows Fury X has
1/16th DP.
Depending on the computer workload though, Fury X can beat GM200.
Most of us don't care about DP though and it was just a minority of OG Titan owners that talked about it to justify why getting ripped off was worth it back then. :biggrin: