Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Got ca$h ? At roughly 3000 EURO / USD this WaterForce kit offers quite a lot, but obviously it will be out of range for 99.99% of you guys. That said, it is wiser to invest in 2-way SLI opposed to 3-way SLI as scaling simply is better value wise. Why would you opt a kit like this over say three GTX 980 WindForce cooled cards at a total of 2000 EURO ? Well, aesthetics and cooling I guess. This kit looks great, and it performs excellent on the GPU's, I mean we are hovering at 50 Degrees C on all three cards under load. A benefit to that is the improved overclock potential. Albeit with three cards ... would really overclock ? 3-way SLI works well, but does not scale as good as 2-way. We always figured 3-way SLI to be more for the benchmark crunchers and true aficionado’s rather than is being a wise investment.  With a single monitor setup up-to say 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 you'd be good to go with just one card, two if you want that extra boom-boom-pow and yeah, at ultra HD 3-way SLI could make sense. But blimey, you need to spend so much money for what you receive in return scaling wise. Processor power then. We use a X79 / Core i7 3960 Extreme processor clocked at 4600 MHz. Pretty much the equivalent of the X99 with a 6-core processor, yet clocked faster. With multi-GPU gaming these faster clocked 6-core puppies do show an increase in performance. You do need to wonder though if the 10~15% performance increase in lower resolutions really justifies that money, but obviously if you can afford two or three cards in SLI, you probably will go for the best and fastest infrastructure as well. That would be X79 and upwards to X99 with a nice 6 or 8 core processor.

Noise & Heat

The temperature target protection of the reference GeForce GTX 980 hovers in the 80 to 85 Degrees C at maximum. The WaterForce will sit at 50 Degrees C per card depending on load and room temperature. Honestly, that is excellent. Noise wise really, it's as good as it can be. With three cards you can hear airflow under full GPU stress. Nothing rather irritating or annoying though. 

In closing

Gigabyte offers a pretty unique solution with the WaterForce, it cooled great, keeps noise at acceptable levels and you will have a truckload of performance. That said, the design in terms of aesthetics probably could have been a notch better. I am missing backplates and rubber tubing as well. As far as the looks go, that's a personal thing so I'll leave that to you to decide. The kit offers monster performance levels though, next to that it is fairly easy to install as well. The cooling perf is grand, allowing you to overclock this 3 Way SLI setup, while doing so we never even breached 650 Watts, that is pretty crazy really. Now if you plan to overclock CPU and GPUs, then make sure you add at least another 300W onto your PSU requirements, this is why we always recommend higher Watt power supplies as you need that little extra reserve my man. There is a secondary reason, power supply efficiency is at its best at 50% load. So if your PC SLI combo eats 375 Watt on average during gaming, a nice and proper 80-plus certified 750 Watt PSU would be a strong recommendation here. Keep that in mind okay? A good PSU can actually save you money on the long term.
 

Any SLI concerns ?

To be able to operate two or more cards in SLI mode you'll need a SLI compatible motherboard, please stick to Z87, Z97, X79 or a X99 motherboard. Please do check that out before opting for your SLI preference and thus before purchasing multiple cards. Driver Compatibility - In all our tests we had no real driver issues. Scaling wise 3-way SLI is a bit of a harder challenge opposed to 2-way SLI. Also we stumbled into a game or two where 3-way SLI scaling did not even kick in, Metro and Tomb raider where such examples in Ultra HD. The rest of the games all worked straight out of the box. We see a bit of a bottleneck with Hitman Absolution up-to WHQD but that is expected with so much raw graphics horsepower under the hood. You'll notice that with older game titles as well. Other than that, seriously nothing less than props. When using SLI the difference is there and measurable, but the question remains to be seen whether or not you find that extra cash it worth it for three 980'ies. Regardless of what option you choose, you'll gain a serious performance kicking your configuration into the highest gear performance wise.

The Bottom Line

The thermals are well under control, noise levels acceptable and even in 3-way SLI you can even overclock really well, albeit with so much performance, the differences are harder to spot. The kit is incredible though, all factory overclocked and chilled for you. As such, nice job Gigabyte !

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