Thanks for that screenshot on Tom's Hardware, Glimpse. I retrieved the website two days ago (September 23rd 11 AM Japan time). Turns out Tom's has also altered its GPGPU power consumption benchmark for reference GTX 980, maybe per NVidia's request too?

This is the screenshot two days ago ...

What is so fishy about this card's release is the very few (even some nonexistent at all!) CUDA specific benchmarks done on it. I mean, they've been clamoring about "fewer but 40% more powerful per CUDA core", but all we see on popular benchmark sites like Anandtech or Tom's is mostly OpenCL based ...

Student upgrades to 1.55 are on the to do list, after finishing all the 2.0 commercial updates this month and next. If you want to get a newer version before then, you will have to buy it. Student license are free, commercials ones are on the store page, We don't have a 3rd option at the moment. We ...

And also about the 1.5 student license as stated above, when will that become available?

This is good news!
So when will the student license be upgraded to 1.5?

Don't know 'bout plugins, but at least standalone(from what I've hearded) will be free (1.5 version) after they release 2.0 =)
That's not correct. After 2.0 is out there will be a free student version of Octane Standalone (and the Blender, Maya and 3ds max plugins) based on 1.5. Currently the ...