Gadgetory

now I have been pretty fortunate over the past year to get my hands on a lot of different graphics cards for review and it's usually quite easy and pretty straightforward I mean you talk about the specs you get touchy feely with it of course you talk about its appearance does it have a backplate BBG am looking at you finally you follow it all off with some benchmark numbers and there you go a pretty standard and straightforward video card review but when the gigabyte water force arrived in an actual suitcase I was like what did I get myself into with the new Silencio performance optimized fans the coolermaster neptune 240 m delivers the perfect balance of noise and performance click the link in the description to find out more I'll be honest I really didn't know where to start in fact that when I was approached by gigabyte I didn't even realize that this thing was real I mean I've heard that you know there were rumors about it and now there's some photos I really didn't know anything about it at all now the packaging really does look like it came straight from the luggage store because that's what it is a piece of freaking luggage but the guts are nice and padded with soft foam enough soft foam to actually make lioness blush and it's going to keep things nice and secure during shipping so I wouldn't be too concerned about damage from the good old folks over at UPS and FedEx the components inside are also being nicely secured with some nylon straps so things are going to be bouncing around nearing shipping so I feel they're pretty well protected so that's good the only downside is that mine came with a lot of scratching on the case but that's probably due to the fact that this is a review unit and it's not actually a retail sample at least I think now installing this thing will take some preparation so I highly highly recommend reading the instructions maybe even a few times prior to trying to install this behemoth now I'm not going to spend any time on how to install this thing because gigabyte has already prepared an installation video which you guys can take a look at for more information but one thing worth noting is that there is a specific order to how this thing is installed so if you're like me and you like to toss away the instructions you might want to go and get those things out of the trash I'm just saying now looking at the graphics cards yeah I said cards there are three gtx 980 s in this kit i was a little surprised by the lack of back plates now this is a bit disappointing especially since earlier in the year I gave gigabyte high praise for including back plates on all of their GTX 970 980 wind force cards so I don't understand why the sudden removal of the back plate and to me it just seems like a step in the wrong direction a little bit more like towards EVGA I thought it might have been due to the card clearance but there's plenty of room for back plates so I don't know when it comes to cooling these bad boys each card has its own pre-installed water block which also has houses the water pump and ample length of quarter inch flex tube or fep tubing along with each card having their very own dedicated 120 millimeter radiator it really does seem like the AMD 295x2 is inspired a little bit of this kit the included 3-way SLI bridge looks pretty nice with its all-black frame and blue gigabyte logo but keep in mind that some motherboards do not have standard PCI spacing as this bridge does so if you have a motherboard that actually pushes the third card down an extra slot this bridge is actually not going to be working for you so you're going to be forced to use the one that actually came with your motherboard so you definitely want to keep that in mind now the radiator box is clearly the centerpiece for this kit and it simply mounts on top of your existing case with some spring-loaded finger things keeping it in place it's actually a lot like the coolant CPU kit now it also features a swing-away store for easy radiator fan access and it also features soft rubber feet to keep them from damaging your desk or your PC you could technically leave this separate on your desk if you want it or maybe if you had a case it didn't support top rounded or mounted box thing like this or if you're using an open-air test bench now it does feature an all-metal design so there won't be any risk of damaging the components inside but one thing you must keep in mind is that it does add a bit of top heaviness to the case so once it's mounted you want to be very careful of moving it around so you don't tip the damn thing over because that would make for a very bad day now the radiators simply snap in place without the need for tools but like I've said a few times now there are specific spots where each radiator must be installed so please set aside your pride and consult the manual I promised guys it'll only sting for a little while and it's not like I'm asking you guys to go ask for directions right right the front of the red box also has an integrated fan and pump controller where you can monitor things like GPU temperature or control the fans or a target temp or even the pump speed and it all communicates through a USB header on the motherboard for this function to work you have to make sure you have at least one USB header available in your system but not only does this serve as kind of a control center but it also has a door that swings open to allow easy access to the stuff inside now remember you still have to route the tubes and cables into the case somehow and that is actually managed through a five and a quarter expansion bay in this little like slide in thingy the last thing worth mentioning before we install this beast is the GPU support bar which is included and offers an extra support to keep the cards from sagging I don't know if this is something I would actually use because the cards really aren't that heavy but I kind of feel like it looks a little tacky and I mean being brutally honest it looks terrible and if but if you're a function over form kind of person then you could install this on your GPUs to support some extra weight and give yourself a little extra peace of mind knowing you're not going to damage your motherboard PCI Express slots now do have plenty to say about this kit regarding its looks and whatnot but I'll save that for the conclusion of this review so really the only logical thing left to do right now is to get this bad boy installed and load up those benchmarks transition time transition now installing the water force really isn't all that hard and it was pretty straightforward and as long as you actually follow the instructions and install things in the right order you're likely not going to have a hard time putting it together at least theoretically something's kind of a really picky now for this build I used my fractal design arc XL and I decided to use this case instead of my case labs test bench because I wanted to use something that would more closely resemble what the average consumer would be using most people are not using case labs test benches but one of the reasons I use the arc XL is because of its sheer size which I thought what's going to make the extra long tubing seam well not so long but I massively underestimated the length of this tube I mean I get that they're trying to make this thing seem more compatible with many more cases on the market but the length of the tubing was just plain ridiculous and for a while there it looked less like a PC and more like a sentinel from the matrix in fact on Instagram some people said it looked like the Borg anyway the only thing I could really do to make the to be more manageable was to basically just tuck it away back here where the hard drives would normally go and I wasn't able to achieve anything even remotely close to what they show in the manual which has these really nice crisp 90-degree bends which make everything look super tidy in fact I was left easily with an extra foot at least a foot in half of cable the tube to figure out what to do with so GG the one thing I initially thought was going to be a nice bonus touch to this kit where these kind of like comb things that clip over the FTP tubes which is theoretically supposed to help them stay nice and orderly but after trying to bend those excess tubes out of the way I quickly learned that any time any sort of force is actually placed against those clips they just popped off and went flying all around the case so really they turned out to be useless and I just stopped trying to even use them all together so after finally getting everything installed I managed to halfway organized the tubes I'm going to keep harping on these tubes because they are ridiculously too long but I decide to get that fancy GPU Jack thing a test run and I quickly realized that with my all-in-one cooler up top I was not able to move the post closer to the middle of the back of the cards as it recommends in the manual so I said had to install it more time decide at kind of a 45 degree angle which puts the weight at the end of those little finger things that's holding it up and then turn those are now sagging because of the weight leverage being at the end of these plastic fingers now wouldn't have really been an issue if they had been made of metal so I'm not going to really bother using that thing at all I mean not to mention once the hydraulic post is fully extended it doesn't really put a lot of pressure on the top or the bottom of the case and I can simply move it around with very little force now perhaps that's due to the fact that the arc XL is really tall but once again the length of the tubing tells me that they anticipated the cases being used for this kit we're going to be huge so really it's too small for a big case now get gigabyte an A for effort that's about it now the radiator box also features a digital fan controller for managing fan speeds and even target temperatures which you can set to let the controller do what it needs to do to reach those target temperatures it automatically speed up and slow down the fans based on the settings now there's also a manual mode where you can manually set the pumps and fan speeds and speaking of fan speeds these will actually go all the way up to 30 250 rpm what's funny about that is the actual max fan speed setting on the controller is 3000 so I guess we're getting a little bit extra for the money when it comes to the fan controller now unfortunately the fan controller does look a little bit antiquated with a very basic LCD screen and lack of touch display given the price of this units I would have hoped for something a little bit more elegant when it comes to user interface lastly the rad box fan controller will not work unless the USB header is plugged into the motherboard now I get why I can't control the pumps when it's not plugged in because the pumps are actually getting their power from the GPU fan header but I actually plugged into the controller but why can I not control the fans without the USB plugged in the fans are actually plugged into the controller itself which has its own power so this makes no sense to me in fact if you don't have the fan controller plugged into the USB slot on the motherboard you're given nothing more than a flashing prompt telling you to plug it into the motherboard and all the controls are locked until you do that the plug in the header wasn't enough then still wants you to install OC guru - which for me was a complete deal-breaker because I'm sorry to say it is a terrible piece of software I really prefer MSI Afterburner and without that installed the fans will run in about 2,000 rpm which are quite noisy doing that right now you might actually hear them so to quiet down the fans you have to install OC guru - and that's just terrible strong-arming people into that software now one last thing worth mentioning about the radiator boxes if your case has its power and reset us in USB ports on the top like the archaic cell does and keep in mind that the tubes and power cables routed through the case in that five and a quarter drive bay are going to likely cover up those buttons and you know making turning on the PC a bit of a hassle as it has to because you have to force your finger in there between the tubes to turn on the PC yeah guys I know there's a joke in there trust me I'm trying to keep at least one video clean okay can we just have one clean video alright I've gone on long enough about some of the things that I don't actually like about the looks of this thing but this is still a graphics card review so let's go ahead and jump into those benchmarks now I know most people are not using x99 based systems especially for gaming so I decided to build out my 4790k for this one there's a lot closer to what people would be using in the real world than my 5820k overclocking of these cards was really straightforward it was really easy it's just like overclocking any other graphics card on the market and it actually features a twelve hundred twenty eight megahertz base clock with a 1329 boost clock in fact that seems extremely conservative and safe considering one of the direct benefits of water cooling a graphics card is their ability to overclock them balls-to-the-wall but not only that this is gigabytes custom PCB design so I figure why when they at least give this thing a little extra oomph out of the box setting it apart from the crowd anyway after overclocking them I managed to a respectable fifteen hundred and thirty megahertz it's not exactly packed meeting when it comes to overclocking but still a two hundred megahertz bump over the boost clock is really not that bad at all now gigabyte recommends a 1200 watt power supply unit for this thing but I managed to get by with even my Rosewill 1000 watt tachyon platinum power supply unit now given the efficiency of the GPUs I really wasn't too worried about not having enough power but you have to make sure you have at least six eight pin PCI Express power connectors available though because the custom PCB has dual eight pin power connectors on the board now I happen to actually not have dedicated 8 pin cables I had the pigtail with two sets of cables on there but it still didn't seem to affect anything did have any perceivable overclocking stability issues and so far nothing's caught on fire yet now if you notice in the benchmark slides I actually tested the temperatures of the GPUs at 500 rpm speed intervals on the fan controller I was actually surprised at how well the single thin 120 millimeter radiator was cooling not only the GPU but also the RAM and the vrm on these blocks because they do have a heat pipe that goes from the vrm to the block as well now gigabyte advertises that this thing is thirteen point one decibels quieter than reference 3-way 980 s and forty percent lower on thermals now I have no way to actually measure the decibels but I will say that the cooling performance is actually very very good in fact with the fans running at only a thousand rpm which was actually quieter than the case fans in this archaic cell the cards never exceeded 50 degrees Celsius even when playing battlefield 4 at 4k for over a half hour that's actually quite impressive now if you bump the speeds up to a more reasonable 1,500 rpm then the temps drop down into the 40s and the noise is still not at issue in fact that's how skunk works is in the 40s okay its conclusion time and I have to say that I have spent a lot of time pondering how to end this one and so far it sounds an awful lot like I'm nitpicking this thing to death allow me to explain why sync costs $3,000 basically I reviewed this unit as I would expect anyone to as if they had spent $3,000 on this thing and how would you feel about it now even though the performance is really really good and it's on par with standalone 3-way SLI 980 s I just don't really know how much sense it makes I mean yeah it performs really well but not better than other 3-way setups but I still can't get past the overall ugly appearance of this thing now I have to assume that gigabyte has done market research on this and I should assume that that research told them that someone was interested in buying this thing I'm still just not sure who that is now I've tried to look at this objectively by putting myself in the shoes and position of someone who may not be comfortable with buying their own graphics cards tearing them apart and water cooling their GPUs themselves and building a custom water cooling loop but believe it or not the 3-way 980 set up in skunk works it's featuring custom loop with three eky Bloks EK back plate cylinder res custom bit acrylic tube the cost of rigid tube fittings custom sleeve power cables adjustable speed defy pump with high flow top nano fluid and still came in at $400 less than this thing costs and compared to the aesthetics the custom loop looks fantastic and you can't say that you can't water cool wind force cards because EK now makes 970 and 980 wind force blocks now the other thing I'm curious about is why they chose a 3-way config to be honest the 3-way config is kind of like the black sheep of the SLI family and most gamers only have one card but the next common thing being two cards very few gamers have three cards know very very if you have four cards and with poor SLI scaling bumping up the cost of this unit to put a third card in really seems like a mistake now this should have been a 2-way set up in my opinion if you do happen to fit that demographic of gamer looking for prefilled pre-built 3-way 980 setup with a fear of water cooling your own computer and a extra $3,000 burning a hole in your pocket then perhaps this unit is for you now to be unfair for me to say that just because I'm not sold on it doesn't mean someone wouldn't be and this isn't really off the top of my head type of assumption either if you go and look online at some of the postings about this unit you'll find that there seems to be a very resounding why does this exist from people who are actually looking at this thing 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 980 120 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 alright guys that has been Jays 2 cents on the water force 3 away 980 setup from gigabyte what are your thoughts on this would you actually buy this now I've told you before that you as viewers should take what we as reviewers say as opinion and formulate your own opinion based on the information we're presenting you I'm really curious as to how you guys feel about this unit so sound off in the comments I'm pretty sure gigabyte is going to be looking everybody head on over to Twitter or Facebook and tell me directly how you guys feel about it there you can actually find little pop-up here to tell you where you go alright guys that's it for today happy holidays and as always I hope to see you guys in the next one