Final update - Ignore most of the stuff below this update as it's very old. Hopefully, this is the final forum post regarding my 3 years of owning the EVGA GTX 980 FTW cards
EVGA support was wonderful and I was able to navigate the advanced cross ship RMA within a few business days. Thanks EVGA. My two new RMA cards should be arriving soon. I hope these replacements are properly binned and run at the advertised boost speeds. That's all i wanted from the beginning. To the curious - they are replacing the cards with the same model number / same card (no upgrade or equivalent swap).
 
Here's to hoping. Thanks to the forum community, customer service representatives, and RMA case techs at EVGA.
 
 
Update (again):
 
Even when using "debug mode" as advised by EVGA support, (which i believe runs the cards at stock vanilla GTX 980 speeds) I'm still getting black screen hard lock crashes. *Although it's MUCH more stable in debug mode, this is still unacceptable. I've already re-opened my support ticket and hopefully i can get an RMA before my cards get out of warranty.
 
Update and recap:  So a few weeks ago I was getting black screen / hard crashing and sound buzz while gaming in Dragon Age Inquisition. Upon the crash, one of the GPUs wouldn't "power back on" ... and i mean when my computer would reboot it wouldn't power on and windows would not recognize it.  Once i powered down / CMOS clear, it would come back up. At first i thought my PSU was the issue but after more testing I realized that one of GTX 980 FTWs was not stable at stock (out of the box) 1405 boost.  This was with no changes on my end using precision x, this was simply the default speeds while gaming.  Once i reduced the boost by 100 the top card was stable.  
 
The problem got worse and worse and eventually even at -100 boost clock the card would crash.  So I RMA'd the card.  EVGA was very helpful and took care of me via a cross ship RMA. The new one arrived, and I have not had any crashes at stock boost clock of 1405 mhz.  I'll experiment with overclocking over the next few days.  I'm just very happy to have a stable system again.  
 
My question is this...  My new FTW  that was sent to me by EVGA via RMA, has a different BIOS than my other one.  Does this matter? Should I update / flash my other card?

I've included the ASIC scores and a pic of my rig for fun.  I have not OC'd yet but I will over the next few days.
 

NEW 980 FTW FROM RMA:

LAUNCH DAY 980 FTW:

 

SYSTEM: 

Asus P8P67-Pro 
2600k @ 4.4ghz  (h100i cooler)
8gb XMS 3 1600
2 x EVGA GTX 980 FTW (1405 boost)
OCZ ZX 1000 watt 
Corsair 750d case

Good morning,
 
During the production process of video cards the BIOS revision can change. This can be due to different memory being used ect. There is no need to flash your first video card. Even with two different BIOS revisions they will run perfectly fine in SLI. 

howdy2u2

Prophit
My question is this...  My new FTW  that was sent to me by EVGA via RMA, has a different BIOS than my other one.  Does this matter? Should I update / flash my other card?
 

No, it has no effect on OC or anything else for that matter.  I tried matching bios on some cards and updating them all to the same bios. 2 cards took the new bios, 1 card turned in to a brick................

As stated in the next post by JoeyC, sometimes the BIOS revisions are created in order to support different memory manufacturers or memory models.  When that happens, if you try to force the BIOS from a model with different memory, the card can fail to initialize properly.  Sometimes you can recover from the failure by force flashing the correct BIOS back to the failed card.  But sometimes, the card is effectively bricked due to initialization errors preventing the card from being detected by nvflash.  In that case, you can flash the BIOS chip directly externally by soldering wires to the BIOS eeprom chip or desoldering the eeprom and flashing with special hardware.
 
Long story short, flashing the BIOS to the eeprom can be very risky business and is often an unnecessary risk.

EVGATech_JoeyC
Good morning,
 
During the production process of video cards the BIOS revision can change. This can be due to different memory being used ect. There is no need to flash your first video card. Even with two different BIOS revisions they will run perfectly fine in SLI. 

Hi Joey, The bios version that the op posted 84.04.2F.01.80 is listed as k|ngp|n on here...http://kingpincooling.com/forum/showthread.php?p=28781 
If this is correct why would the op have it on a FTW version or is the post incorrect? 
 
ty

An interesting find antandbetty.  I'm curious, too.

can you extract the bios 84.04.2F.01.80 using Gpu-z and send it to me.... I will pm you my email address.... it is very easy to do... TY...also responded to your other post in my thread...
 

Prophit
An interesting find antandbetty.  I'm curious, too.

Thank you
 

Prophit
To further clarify, my RMA was a cross ship.  The one i received back from EVGA (before i sent mine in) had the 84.04.2F.01.80 version on it.  I'll look at the voltages and extract it later tonight.

I just tried extracting the 84.04.2F.01.80 BIOS using TechPoweruUp's GPU-z (version 0.8.1) and i received a hard crash / lock up.  I rebooted, tried again - same thing.  I cannot extract the bios.  I'm on Windows 8.1 with all the latest patches and running the Nvidia driver 347.52. There are a few other people on the forums that receive crashes as well with windows 8.1.  I'm not sure if or when they will fix this.
 
I'll look into it more later but at this point i cannot provide the BIOS.  
 
EDIT: UPDATE - i even tried disabling the card in device manager, then trying to extract... same crash.  Betty, can you find the BIOS elsewhere?  I'll work on getting screenshots of the voltages next.

Update - many months later, I'm now getting black screen crashes and buzzing noise lockups in Destiny 2. Destiny 2 and The Witcher 3 have been my most recent games that cause the issue.
 
If i downclock my GPU core and memory (by 125 core and 100 memory) it does stabilize it a bit but i still get an occasional lockup. 
 
I guess i need to start another RMA process. 

[19 pages worth to look over]
https://forums.evga.com/So-GTX-980-FTW-are-very-bad-cards-m2346232.aspx
 
that slight change in the RMA / latest  in the bios revision maybe the change to help fix over first release 980  ftw's ??   maybe exclusive for evga service dept... not listed here ?
 
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=NVIDIA&manufacturer=EVGA&model=GTX+980&interface=&memType=&memSize=&since=

Sajin

Prophit
Update - many months later, I'm no getting black screen crashes and buzzing noise lockups in Destiny 2. Destiny 2 and The Witcher 3 have been my most recent games that cause the issue.
 
If i downclock my GPU core and memory (by 125 core and 100 memory) it does stabilize it a bit but i still get an occasional lockup. 
 
I guess i need to start another RMA process. 

What happens when you test the cards individually?

Both cards crash individually but it's much less frequent. While running both GPUs in SLI, I tried swapping PCIE slots as well just for kicks, still crashing.

I opened a support ticket again, asking them what my options are. I've had so many problems with these cards.

Have you tested the cards in another system to be 100% sure the cards are the issue?