Gadgetory

hey Ron i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're talking about the msi seahawk GTX 980 video card and this was made in cooperation with coarse hair so it's an MSI and corsair product they technically have two different names there's the MSI version called the Seahawk which is what we have here and this is identical to the Corsair version which is called the hydro graphics or hydro GFX and the thing that Corsair contributed here is the liquid cooling unit so they provide the CLC and that is an H 55 liquid cooler which is the same thing you find the CPU market just basically adapted to a GPU by using Corsairs hg 10 bracket and that bracket as seen here has a vrm cooler built into it which is the blower fan on the front and it's also got a small heatsink on top of the actual vrf in terms of specifications the GTX 980 TI is going to be the same matter what company you buy from but the main thing they change is the cooling unit which in this case is the H 55 and then of course the clock rate so for the Seahawk the base clock rate is eleven ninety megahertz and the boost clock rate is 1291 megahertz to put that in perspective the reference 980 TI has built and sold by Nvidia uses a 1000 mega Hertz base clock and a 1075 megahertz boost clock so quite a big gain over reference for comparison one of our favorite cards right now and the best performing GPU we've tested at least before this one is the EVGA 980 TI hybrid also a liquid-cooled card also using an ASA tech liquid cooling solution that video card ships at twelve twenty eight megahertz boost against the 1291 of this card so we should see a frame rate increase with the Seahawk and if history is a guide which normally is the hybrid EVGA hybrid outperformed the reference card someone considerably in some games so we'll see if that holds true here so this video is more of a comparison between the EVGA hybrid and the MSI Seahawk or corsair hydro graphics and that's because you're probably buying one of the two the EVGA hybrid is currently priced at seven hundred and ten dollars but up until this point it's been seven fifty or 770 the reduction is likely in response to this which is a 750 dollar video card available online already so the price gap is certainly noticeable and it's enough to potentially influence decisions let's run through the differences between the cooling solutions on the hybrid and on the Seahawk the primary difference in the two video card cooling solutions is the way the cold plate is extruded so with the EVGA hybrid video card it uses a copper cold plate with an extruded base and it's all one unit of copper it's effectively a unibody piece of copper and that extruded surface provides a better and more tuned contact with the GPU then you'll get with an H 55 cooler the reason for that is because the CPU package size and the surface smoothness of the CPU package is going to be different than what you find at a GPU especially when considering the IHS or the integrated heat spreader on CPUs doesn't exist on GPUs it's basically just exposed silicon and you want a cooler that or a cold plate that can utilize the direct contact with the silicon die so that's the main difference they are both ASA tech designs and supplies so the tubing is pretty similar if not the same the braid is still really nice on the MSI Seahawk I'm a big fan of the finish on this tubing and on the radiator the fan it all works the same way as any other ASA tech unit would work other differences include the fan so on the EVGA unit the fan cord is connected directly to the video card like that which means that you can kind of tether it up with the tubes on this one as you can see the fan cord is connecting straight to the motherboard so you're using a three pin header on the motherboard to connect the fan and then you can control things that way through bios so difference there other than that it's just LEDs on the fan from corsair there's an LED up here for MSI and then the faceplate is quite different as well EVGA is now shipping a separate faceplate so what you're seeing here isn't necessarily what they're shipping alongside the new 980 TI hybrids if you do the faceoff upgrade liquid cooling a video card is actually becoming somewhat important for the high-end units the big GPUs and a couple reasons for that the main ones are items that we discussed in our fury x review and those would include obviously reduced overall thermals substantially in some cases reduced power leakage from the capacitors and vrm so that's basically it improves power efficiency it improves your efficiency performance per watt and that's because we're reducing the amount of power lost through heat so when you have a hot capacitor it does a worse job at retaining that power and you have efficiency loss which increases the heat of the unit even further so it sort of builds on itself in the case of liquid cooling especially the fury X which does things a bit uniquely by liquid cooling it's vrm and memory as well with liquid cooling you're reducing thermals across everything the liquid isn't in contact with which in this case is the GPU and that reduces thermals of the surrounding components around the GPU like the capacitors reduces thermals of the vrm just by nature of putting it under less load to clean the power so that's a big deal and that's why liquid cooling is important on these high on GPUs if you're doing any kind of overclocking or putting it under load regularly using liquid cooling also reduces the chance of sag so video card sag is something that msi is familiar with because they're gaming cards do sag a bit even with the support backplate and by using a CLC by mounting a pump to the GPU you're removing a huge amount of aluminum and copper both which are very heavy metals compared to the plastic and the copper coldplay here so that removes weight from the card and the heaviest component the cold plate itself is more centrally located so the weight distribution is going to be supported by the expansion slot in the case also a good thing let's run through the tests to see how the two cards compare and how the Seahawk performs first of all for temperatures the MSI Seahawk has a delta t delta temperature over ambient 40 Celsius for the sustain the equilibrium test and that is up against a 40 s fury X temperature using a cooler master CLC and more importantly a much hotter GPU package and up against the strict coolers which are very efficient but you're looking at 960 and 950 here but more importantly up against the reference design 980 TI which is in the 60s celsius so that's a 20 Celsius improvement with a Seahawk card definitely noticeable and definitely a big deal for the hybrid though you seen in the 20s 23 Celsius delta T with the 980 I hybrid by EVGA which is a 19 Celsius difference and that is massive that's let me make it clear that either way both of these cards are very high performing coolers they operate at temperatures that really the Delta between them is not going to impact any gamers any mainstream users even overclockers will be impacted in a limited fashion because 40 Celsius is still pretty cool but it's not as cool as 23 obviously so moving on from that we have the power charts this is total system power this is not individual GPU power that means it's the requirement for the entire computer to operate and with the Seahawk we see a 392 dot 76 watt power draw against the 350 3.5 wat reference that's an increase of about 40 watts which is really not that bad considering the clock rate is increased and if you look at our charts we compared the clock for clock with the reference and the hybrid and the Seahawk and basically it's it's the clock rate increase and the power percent target increase that is causing the extra wattage to be produced here or be required rather EVGA is at 367 24 the reference model many overclocker you get closer to the Seahawk moving on to FPS in-game benchmarks we see generally about a four to seven percent gain over the hybrid which is a couple FPS on average the CLC card to outperform reference by about eight to fifteen percent depending on the game so that is again pretty noticeable and that's attributable to their pre overclocked core clock in general the Seahawks lead is minimal over the hybrid and could be easily ignored but it is undeniable that the Seahawk is objectively and we'll call it first place for fastest single GPU card on our benchmark now and that granted it the best of bench award on the website the new MSI and Corsair gtx 980 I outmatches EVGA s hybrid by a single frame per second in the witcher 3 at 4k which is just barely outside of margin of error it's a measured difference and display consistently through numerous tests internations but that difference is still just barely there there is no denying that the Seahawk is at an advantage with its increased core clock and the single frame is totally unnoticeable the gamers but we can look at other resolutions and other games to see how things look there so in the winter three at 1440 there's a more measurable difference of four point eight percent and at 1080p we see a four point seven percent Delta so not a huge deal really for either of these cards in terms of differences they're both very strong performers in gta5 at 4k which is a very high load scenario the Seahawk has a 15-percent advantage over the reference 92 ti and that becomes more tangible that's a 10 FPS gain at 1440p or 12 point nine eight percent so that's where you start seeing okay now I can enable different settings and utilize that a yes for better gameplay better visuals against the hybrid it's a four point seven two six point three percent difference for k and 1440p respectively favoring the Seahawk again this advantage is yielded by the faster clock but you can see in the chart it's only a couple FPS depending on which resolution you're at metro last light shows another five to six percent Delta between a Maasai and EVGA for the CLC GPUs and that performance Delta is favoring MSI once again it's still small enough to force consideration of other factors though like cost efficiency of the cooling solution and obviously what you're planning to do with the card in terms of overclocking more benchmarks are on the website but you can look at a couple here overclocking is really important for these cards as well so looking at the charts you'll see the steps that I took to produce the highest achievable clock with our sample big disclaimer here are two big disclaimers here one there is a thin that we in the community called the silicon lottery which many of you are familiar with that means this card will not necessarily overclock the same as other reviewers or as yours and that's because the GPU is not the same for every device it is still the GTX 980 TI GPU the GM 200 series gpus Maxwell GPUs but the actual performance and the stability of the silicon will vary from chip two chip so that noted it's also not necessarily advised to push the highest possible clock rate for your card because it will wear the lifespan down of the card we do it here for testing because we're just over clogging to see how well it performs and it's not being used for years after that looking at the charts the Seahawk achieved a 1521 megahertz poor overclock which is massive over reference and only a 3846 memory overclock in terms of frequency so that was a 300 megahertz offset which is 200 megahertz less than the hybrid and even the reference 980 TI that we have both of which achieved a four thousand one megahertz memory clock I would probably attribute this to silicon lottery or the bending process used for the MSI card because the cooling solution should be fine so it seems like some kind of bidding going on where the memory on my particular card is not as performant as its owners but the quarter clock was a seven ish megahertz gain or the hybrid so that should produce parity in the FPS tests and if you look at these you'll see that the frame rates are now effectively identical when we look at the overclocked hybrid and the overclocked seahawk because their core clock is now pretty close to the same the big conclusion is on the website so if you're a potential buyer and you want all the details go read that for the granularity but we'll just go through it quickly here the EVGA 980 TI hybrid and the MSI Seahawk also known as the corsair hydro graphics are the two directly competing cards on the market right now in terms of 980 TI's of liquid cooling so those are the two that you want to look at if you're buying something at a seven hundred dollar range let's liquid cooled and is an eye a TI this one is 750 dollars the EVGA solution is currently 710 dollars but has historically been 752 770 it has also historically been difficult to get your hands on although the stock is now available on new I again so it's it's finally available so that stated if the price of the hybrid remains or is currently at seven hundred and ten dollars when you're buying that makes it almost a win immediately unless you're of a certain group of users as the prices equalize these two cards will be in very direct competition and the main differences here are that and I'll show a pros and cons table on the website and we'll throw it up here two main differences are that the MSI Seahawk technically outperforms the hybrid and pure FPS testing if you're not overclocking at all if you are unwilling to overclock and you just want to buy something that gets the best FPS even if it's only maybe 1 2 3 or 1 25 FPS faster than the nearest competitor then the Seahawk is the clear Victor in the scenario it is the best of bench GPU that we have tested using the current generation of video cards or actually any generation of video cards so that's certainly impressive if you are willing to overclock the hybrid from EVGA is very easily pushed to the 1291 megahertz stock clock of this one and can push about the same max overclock so that makes them achieve parity makes them effectively identical in performance if you are willing to do that extra few minutes of work you feel comfortable doing that overclock check our guides if you don't then the hybrid is again a worthwhile contender to look at another item to look at is going to be the overclocking ability we had issues with memory clocks here but that does not actually impact your in-game FPS your real-world performance so in that regard I would sort of ignore the memory overclock limitation because we still got 300 megahertz offset which is still very noteworthy and the core clock had no trouble overclock into the same general area in fact even more than the EVGA hybrid solution beyond these items it really comes down to a few things like do you really want a Corsair and a Masai branded device in your computer this is a real thing to consider because performance wise the hybrid and the Seahawk are both very good there again effectively identical so if you want a branding consistency if you're going for a theme then your choice is made if you like the way it looks that's obviously an important factor as well I'm not really going to comment on aesthetics hear what I think about it because I think that's up to you guys as buyers not up to me it's not an objective measurement then do consider the looks consider that the hybrid is offering currently a faceoff upgrade thing for an aluminum faceplate as well so that is worth noticing and then in terms of cooling the EVGA hybrid is just flat-out superior by 19 degrees Celsius and that is because of the extrusion on the cold plate it's because of the fan design and that stated again even the 19 Celsius gain on the hybrid doesn't put this to shame this is still sitting at 40 Celsius which is pretty darn cool especially considering references around 60 Celsius for the 980 TI so either card is a very cool performer the hybrid will be the better solution if you are worried about being thermally limited for one reason or another if you're planning on keeping the CLC and the only real reason I can think of that would be maybe you're in a already hot ambient environment if it's like a hot region that you live in or if you're worried about chipset heat for some reason maybe you're pushing a lot of Io through the chipset and you're utilizing a lot of those HS i/o lanes that would cause it to heat up plus the heat of a video card sitting on top of it would really not be great for the the chipsets longevity so that would be a thing to consider but that's a pretty rare use case and users who are in that scenario likely have other things in mind like open loop cooling so that's all for the Seahawk again wrapping up this thing is a very good performance the best performer on the bench right now it overclocks very well it's seven hundred fifty dollars and the EVGA hybrid is something you should seriously look into as a competitive competing option both of them really are not a buy that you should feel bad about so it's it's kind of it's impossible to choose the wrong card other than price if you're limited on price the choice the bait for you so that's all for this time thanks for watching if you liked this time reporting check out the patreon page linked in the postural video and do check out that article for all the charts and the full detail and I'll see you all next time