Gadgetory

what is up guys Jays two cents here and I am doing my very first review of 2016 I'm enjoying the experimental type videos but of course we're still gonna be doing some product reviews because one of the points of this channel is obviously to try and educate you on some products before you spend a lot of money building a PC or a graphics card or whatever hopefully you got to make the right decision based on the information I'm going to give you but today we're gonna be taking a look at gigabytes new gtx 980ti extreme water force Edition graphics card is it too little too late no let's find out once again I want to give a huge thank you for today's sponsor lynda.com I like to learn things you should like to learn things too and there's nothing more fun than learning things you care about at the pace you want to learn them I've never been the kind of guy who does the best in a classroom setting so I like to learn things that I want to learn about when I want to learn about them and that's what's great about lynda.com it got new classes that are added each and every week thousands of online tutorials about subject matter that matters to you get a free trial membership and start learning something new today but in the description of this video you will find a link it's how they know that I sent you its lynda.com slash j ly NDA comm /jy so head on over there right now and learn something new fill your brains with knowledge other than some of the other useless junk we fill our brains with but something important in there well here it is right here and obviously as you can tell this is a single card with a single radiator something about I said from the very beginning gigabyte should have done and I know you guys are sick of seeing this clip but I'm going to play it again but I do think gigabyte is actually onto something here because I think they just missed the mark what they should have done was simply offer a single 90 80 120 millimeter radiator with much much shorter tubing and let the buyer mount it in a standard 120 millimeter fan slot in their case just like the 295x2 and look how successful that card is but I think if gigabyte relaunched the water force as a single card solution the buzz about it would have been much more positive now in the Box obviously you get the graphics card and the attached water cooling radiator and even a it's like a wristband it's a little like a gym wristband I didn't elect you but sometimes I get really sweaty when I game just taking a quick tour around the unit you can see it does have a backplate it's a standard length unit it's no longer than the actual length of the PCB which is nice because they're air-cooled cards that you guys know adds extra length which makes some compatibility issues with small form-factor cases or even some mid towers although not usually an issue these days it is something to keep in mind you've got a window right here on the front of the card as you can see so you can see your pump and stuff but most of the time it's oriented like this and then you'll have the radiator you know kind of going up to maybe the back of the case or you know something like that yeah all right something like that there we go so you're not gonna really see it it does have an illuminated gigabyte logo right here on the side which is nice it has RGB features the side of the window also lights up it has RGB as you guys know 2016 and CES was like the year of RGB so that's kind of nice to see I guess but you can illuminate that and make colors that you want got your standard i/o you got your DVI on there your three display ports and your HDMI when it comes to specs though it does require to eight pin PCI Express power cables and then it has one six pin axillary coming out the back so that's kind of weird how instead of utilizing some space on the PCB here and putting all three of them together you would have to have two coming out the top and one coming out the back which could be aesthetically a little displeasing you do also have right here though the extreme button on the back which is how you can switch between the different bios that are on here and then of course you've got your two sli fingers on the top because this is four-way SLI compatible now the base clock on this thing is a thousand megahertz so obviously but it's going to push the overclocks farther to twelve hundred and sixteen megahertz plus and that's going to be based on cooling so obviously with the water cooler on here in GPU boost 2.0 it's going to want to take full advantage of the lower thermals and push the overclock farther so I wouldn't be surprised if we see something up in the thirteen or fourteen hundred megahertz range without us even touching a program like GPU guru that comes with this or MSI Afterburner or whatever overclocking utility you like to use the RAM clock is sitting at 1800 megahertz or technically 1800 and one megahertz giving you 7200 for megahertz effective Ram speed on this about 200 megahertz higher than reference as well so obviously this thing is pushing higher clocks all around now when it comes to the RGB features one thing to keep in mind is that it only works with their own proprietary software the GPU guru app so if you want to do RGB control on this MSI Afterburner or EVGA precision is not going to give you control over that which is kind of unfortunate because I do not like the Guru software whatsoever I obviously have my alternatives that I prefer over that so if you want to control the RGB unfortunately you have to use their software all right so that's enough yammering on about the specs and blah blah blah let's go ahead and see how the seeing performance and we'll do some final thoughts some subjective and objective opinions on this card because after all this was one of the first attempts at water cooling this card with the modern series cards obviously I believe ZOTAC did it back in the 500 series but we've come a long way since then so let's see where we are today and whether or not this is one you guys should even consider spending your money on when it rains it pours I tell you so one of the problems with having open and test bench like I have here are they just dropped a cable behind the desk the fan is pretty exposed and I had it all set up I was booting up the system and unfortunately I broke a fan blade off as you guys can sort of see hopefully this is very stiff tubing you guys can sort of see right there I broke a fan blade off with my finger which is why I now have a band-aid on because these are very sharp blades and holy hell did it literally slice the absolute crap out of my finger that's a first I've never done that before so as you guys know when mistakes happen I like to leave them in so unfortunately I'm gonna have to now expand which got me to thinking this might be a perfect opportunity to see exactly how you could change a fan on this if you wanted to so I guess let's go ahead and do that finger really hurts it the edge of that fan just dug in and then BAM and then the blade broke off and went flying somewhere I still haven't found it but blood literally wept out of my finger be careful guys seriously I have never cut myself on a fan before something bit me so I figure this is actually a perfect opportunity to do this considering so many people have asked me if you can change the fan on these units because this one as you guys can see here just like on the other radiators we've taken a look at on these all-in-one cards like this a comb all-in-one card because it's all one unit on a card is they are wired into here not into the motherboard or something so if you did damage your fan like this I guess this is a good example of what you would have to go through if there's just a few perimeter screws there's two on the bottom maybe two on the top appears to be it's now just as I feared on the inside of this and there's fingerprints all over it so now I have the fingerprints of whoever installed this thing so just as I feared it is not using a standard fan plug if you will as you can see this is very different yeah so that powers it appears the pump and the fan so unfortunately the only way you can get this fan off is you pretty much have to cut the thing that's unfortunate so they never anticipated this fan ever having to be switched right so obviously I can't change the fan out on that without having to cut it out because it's literally wired in to the pump the pump also shares the same harness that comes with the fan now this is pretty much the identical fan right here and this as you can see is on the devil card the devil water cooled card from power color which is clearly a 390x not a you know 980ti but it looks like they've sourced the same fan only they have gone with a standard three-pin solution so if gigabyte had done something like this then that would have clearly solved the issue where you could just unbolt it the fan kind of coiled up the cable zip-tied it and then just plugged it in and been up and running so obviously if the fan gets damaged with the msi unit you're stuck with having to go through an RMA whereas on if they had just gone with a unit like this or you know a function like this where the 3-pin just plugs into the card like so then it would have solved our issue so we're gonna have to do for the sake of this video now is I'm gonna have to plug another fan into here I'm gonna cut this fan out I'll probably rewire it myself later and then we are going to just move forward with using a different fan which is going to skew some of the cooling slightly but I don't think it's going to be that much different overall because what I care most about on this obviously is performance and cooling is well at me it kind of sucks I'm I'm sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place here unfortunately my finger took the brunt of it oh well let's move forward okay so I got the new fan installed and just to kind of show you guys what I did here as you can see I literally just cut the fan cable and and pulled it out of the out of the cooler and the fan that I used here is actually just an ek fan but it's not the Vardar I don't want to give their give any sort of cooling advantage by changing the fan so actually chose a fan as you guys can see that is very similar in design it's not glossy but it's got very similar fan blades same number of fan blades and it's also a lower rpm fan this is a 1600 rpm fan versus I don't actually know how fast this one is does it even say on here it doesn't even say it just says model number it's a power logic fan and the does not say the RPM on here so anyway it does say it's a 2 ball bearing fan though anyway let's go ahead and plug this thing again hopefully I don't cut my finger off this time and we get some actual numbers I've had a lot of time to spend with this card now actually the first part of this video that you saw was done quite a while ago but anyway I'm very disappointed that I broke the fan but these things happen I guess but at least to give you guys a pretty good idea of what to expect if you did something similar and you need needed to change out the fan I'm kind of disappointed that the doesn't have a standard plug like all the other water coolers that I tested did where you could have literally just plugged another fan into it three pin fan and then been up and running so that's a little bit unfortunate but in terms of performance it really didn't surprise me meaning the 980ti I feel like has really been tapped where these companies and the custom aftermarket air cooling and the water cooling we've already talked about water cooling doesn't really increase your max overclocks it really just gives you the best temperature for your max overclocks so it really performed where I thought it would it was matching the type next in quite a few tests this is a custom PCB not a reference PCB as say the 980ti hybrid so that's a little bit of a plus this thing overclocked really really good out of the box it went straight to 14 17 just like I thought it might and I think the only card that overclocked farther out of the box was the kingpin from EVGA but this thing I actually achieved 15 22 on the core which seems to be pretty much the norm all of my 980ti is I've ever had come through here all sat right around 15 20 before they started failing and the overclocked testing regardless of what the voltage was this one gives you plus 87 on the voltage and a 130 percent additional re-enacts testing technically an extra 30% power target above so 130 percent which is higher than some other cards now the only time I think you'd see the true full potential of this card is if you went something above and beyond the water-cooling and then what with some like exotic cooling of some sort but if you did do a custom bios on this thing then you could technically push the voltage even farther but the additional power target is nice which probably is why it overclocked all the way to 14 17 automatically of course I want to see how far this card would go and given this card being what it is I don't know why you're even given the option of going to extreme mode you should just do it all the time anyway just let it go there by itself and one thing you might notice compared to other hybrid coolers we've looked at here is this one has no fan on it to offer additional cooling to the PCB but unlike the other options this is the only one that comes with a full cover block built onto it although it'd be transfer of heat pipe it still is giving you full contact cooling for the VRMs the RAM as well as the GPU so this is going to give you the best total cooling for an all-in-one cooling unit unfortunately they chose to use a very short and terrible option of fep tubing fpp tubing doesn't look good in fact this is the only cooler I had that I've tested on this test bench where the 120 radiator did not have a left tubing to meet the front of the case where I had been mounting them to do my hybrid testing so keep that in mind the tubing is a little short and one of the things that really stinks about fep tubing it's very stiff and no matter how you twist it and bend it it kind of wants to do its own thing and just sort of like flop around on itself the rubber tubing options that you find on pretty much all of the other custom cooling units are definitely more desirable than that the last thing is I feel like the cooler and the shroud are kind of cheap looking I mean the shroud is just plastic as I got as I showed you guys when I took it apart it's just a flimsy plastic with a big giant window with a case sticker literally stuck in the front of it and I think that gigabyte could have done a much better job with the aesthetic now there are g/b colors are red by default and obviously you can change that through GPU guru like I said I didn't mess with any of that it didn't matter to me but you guys can change the colors through guru like I said so there you go guys that is the gigabyte 980ti extreme water forces is this too little too late this was something I said 13 months ago they needed to do almost 14 months ago unfortunately everyone else beat them to that single 120 unit cooling for the top-end GPUs when they were kind of the first ones to revise that idea with the three-way water force which as you guys saw I didn't really enjoy or appreciate now of course other cooling companies in the past like ZOTAC have done all-in-one water cooling units on like say the 580 but then that was dropped through the 600 series and the 700 series and brought back late into the 900 series so this is it's nice to see again because we're able to really utilize things like the efficient Maxwell architecture getting great performance very low temperatures this thing maxed out at 47 degrees C which is pretty much exactly what skunkworks graphics cards are doing with the same overclocks as well as being on that giant massive loop so you can see that the radiators are more than enough a single 120 to keep these guys cool but you tell me is this too late do you guys like this design tell me in the comments or tell me on Twitter anyway guys time to go thanks for watching my review of the gigabyte 980ti extreme water force tell me what you think as always guys thanks for watching and I shall see you in the next video now you got to bear with me here I'm gonna probably be moving here in the very near future so it's gonna be very hectic I'm gonna do the best I can to keep my schedule alive I'm gonna do also the best I can to get things pre uploaded far into the future so that it's kind of seamless but it's gonna be a crazy next few weeks anyway thanks for watching see you in the next one