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Gigabyte has a new GPU on the block. The company just announced its new GTX 980 Waterforce graphics card, featuring an all in one watercooling unit and unique GPU shroud to help stand out from the crowd. MSI and EVGA both offer similar offerings in the form of their SeaHawk and Hybrid series cards respectively. We have seen Gigabyte experiment with AIO cooled GTX 980s in the past.
All the way back in March, we got to take a look at the original Gigabyte Waterforce, which was a huge tower attachment that housed radiators for three separate GTX 980s, all cooled with AIO units with flex-tubing.
As you can see from the image above, Gigabyte has given its water cooled GTX 980 a bit of a redesign. It features the same tubing and 120mm radiator but it has dropped the blower style fan entirely, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up temperature wise.
The GTX 980 Waterforce comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, as with all of the standard variants of this card. However, it does come with a higher out-of-box overclock, with a base clock of 1228MHz and a boost to 1329MHz.
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KitGuru Says: At some point, I hope that we will see all AIB partners create AIO cooled variants of high-end GPUs, I imagine quite a few people will appreciate the option, particularly those who aren't experienced with building custom water loops. How many of you water cool your GPU? Do you like the idea of buying an AIO-cooled GPU?
AMDeadia!!!
Oh my God, it’s the unicorn style myth that is a radiator with a 90 degree swivel fitting for the tubes! When will we see this seemingly common sense and vastly improved design in the wild again? Perhaps a few years time?
I thought that was one of the patents ASETEK was fighting Cooler Master over the use of such swivel elbows in computer cooling loops.
As to this it’s just a single card from Gigabyte’s WaterForce 3X SLI system (you know that system they had with that big dog house looking thing you need to bolt to the top of your chassis) these are old hat. They doesn’t like to show the pump and the way they cool VRAM & mosfet’s as it done fairly pitifully.
PCPer has a shot of the waterblock, but it’s not great.
http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Gigabyte-GTX-980-WATERFORCE-Liquid-Cooled-Graphics-Card
Thanks!
Is it me or does the H-P for the MOSFET’s look not to have any direct path to the cooler/pump assembly, while almost appears to be transferring its heat over to what’s probably the memory chip area?
Yeah, it looks to me like there’s a copper heat spreader which the waterblock/pump cools directly, and the heatpipe just connects to that heat spreader. It’s probably slightly more efficient than not having the heatpipe at all and letting ambient air cool the VRMs, but likely not anywhere near as good as VRM heatsinks and a fan.
I hope I’m wrong, though. VRM cooling is more and more important, even on energy-efficient cards like the 980.