I have the acx 2.0 sc w/backplate.
It's super quiet with the default fan profile. It revs up to around 50% speed under benchmark situations and remains mostly inaudible. I've had Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc coolers in the past and this ranks comfortably among the best of them for noise at the default profile.
The fan becomes noisier when it heads above 65+ percent use. Not jet engine like or anything, but certainly audible in a quiet room, yet still easily drowned out by game noise. I haven't had a need to up the fan curve yet so these observations only matter if you are trying for an extra special overclock and want to boost the fan speed for a few extra Mhz.
At the normal fan profile, temps throttle between 79-80 on a hot California day during benchmarks. With a more aggressive fan curve you can easily stay in the mid 70's. It's not as effective as some bigger coolers I've had in the past but it stays well under temps that would cause any boost throttling unlike the reference cards.
The card boosts up to 1304Mhz right out of the box despite what the specs say. And I was able to quickly find a stock voltage stable overclock of +150 core (1102 factory overclock) and +500 (1000Mhz effective). That puts base clocks at 1252Mhz core and 8000Mhz Memory without messing with voltage. Early indications are that with some tweaking I can get to +180 core and +650 Memory. Either way it's nice to get such a good overclock. The best thing about it is with the cooler doing its job so well I'm getting consistent rock steady boost clocks of 1440-1470 with an occasional jump to 1504.
Aesthetically the card is simple and sleek. It's not the fanciest looking card and that can be a good thing. It blends in to my case nicely whereas certain other aftermarket cards could clash if they don't match the scheme. It does have a front facing led badge that says "EVGA Geforce GTX 980Ti SC" which looks rather cool.
All in all I'm very happy with it in every way. There will be other cards coming with bigger, stronger coolers. And cards with custom PCB circuitry that allow higher overclock attempts. But then they'll also be more expensive. There's not really a wrong choice here. This EVGA version is great. Other great models will trickle over the next couple months. If you don't want to wait I highly recommend this model.
Are these clocks still stable with no additional voltage? My SC is not stable at 1250/8000, crashes on me pretty quickly at those clocks. 1225/7900 seems to be alright so far though.
