Gigabyte's New WaterForce Kit Makes Your PC Look Like Bane
Gigabyte's latest water cooling thingy is still weird.
Silently, Gigabyte has posted a product page for the GV-N980X3WA-4GD. While Gigabyte did not clearly give a product name, the product in question is a GTX 980 WaterForce kit.
The WaterForce kit is a three-way SLI setup with three GTX 980 graphics cards, all water cooled through an external radiator box. The radiator box contains a 120 mm radiator for each GTX 980 graphics card, and it has a handful of adjustment controls, too. It can also monitor the temperatures, fan speeds and pump speeds of each individual loop. All of the loops enter the case through a 5.25-inch optical bay, which can be obscured with a cover plate that's included in the kit.
The GTX 980 graphics cards that are installed come factory overclocked, as we'd expect from such a product. They run at 1228 MHz base, with GPU boost frequencies of 1329 MHz. The memory remains at 7.0 GHz, featuring 4 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit memory interface. Gigabyte recommends that you use a 1200 W power supply.
At the end of the day, though, we don't entirely get the idea behind this contraption. The GTX 980 already runs quite cool and quiet, and external water cooling is very much a thing of the past. That said, route the tubing right and you'll do a good job at making your PC look like Bane.
Gigabyte has yet to get back to us with information on pricing and availability.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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chefs When questioned about the new product's name, Gigabyte responded:" It doesn’t matter. What matters is our pla… fan."Reply -
TechyInAZ Yeah it's okish. Only reason i can think of getting one is to make my PC look bigger and meaner lol.Reply -
TechyInAZ One more thing:Reply
And why three cards? that's a lot of money for three cards, they should also sell 2 and single card kits. -
J_Th4ng From the screenshot, it seems that your PC doesn't need a CPU once you have these cards installed... ;)Reply -
iam2thecrowe Is this another case of Gigabyte putting a great cooler on something and then locking out voltage control and low quality vrm's so you cant OC the damn things anyway? P.O.'d at gigabyte for that. Good coolers, crap boards.Reply -
RedJaron Reply
I've read many reports that quad-SLI scales horribly and causes problems in many games. Triple-SLI doesn't seem to have any of those problems.14566183 said:One more thing:
And why three cards? that's a lot of money for three cards, they should also sell 2 and single card kits.
As for why this isn't offered in single- and dual-card packages, my guess is because those setups are easy to air cool. Triple cards tend to be much closer together and getting the breathing room to air cool is often difficult.