Product Showcase
Product Showcase
Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.
So, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is offered as a "WaterForce" Edition from the new Xtreme gaming series. WaterForce obviously is an All-In-One closed loop water cooling system. The card itself, well you will spot a nice dark PCB with quality components on it, two PCI-Express connectors in the form of 8-pin power headers to feed da beast. The new WaterForce version of the cooler had an aesthetic upgrade for the overall design. This new version looks better then the original 980 design really, albeit it's still quite a bit of plastic .
Board partners are able to release the Ti model cards in their own configurations, including different cooling solutions. The Xtreme gaming card is fitted with a 14 Phase Power design. We do think that's actually 2 for memory and then the chokes etc doubled up, six of them in pairs. The default mode base clock is clocked at 1,216 MHz, with a boost allowance up-to 1,317 MHz, a modest tweak compared to what the competition is doing. The memory is clocked at a 1,801x4 = 7.2 GHz (effective data-rate) on its 384-bit wide memory bus of 6 GB GDDR5 memory.
The card itself is a dual-slot solution, the waterblock covers the GPU and bigger part of the VRM area and memory. I say bigger part as our thermal scans show some heat leakage at the VRM area. All within parameters, this card remains to be very cool overall though. Using FEP tubing a cooling block leads to the 120 mm fan based radiator.
The reference card will have a power design of roughly 250 Watts, but due to the high clocks and extensive tweaking design this card consumes way more, roughly 280 Watts as we'll show you later. Check out the backside where there is a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well. There's not a lot of ventilation especially at the GPU area, then again with water-cooling... that's just not a big deal as the GPU barely passes 50 Degrees C under full gaming load.
