Gadgetory

now Corsair didn't invent the business model of starting out Hawking Ram sticks with China heat spreaders on them and then expanding into other product categories but what they've certainly done is made an art form out of doing it well so while of course there isn't the first of the companies that made enthusiasts PC memory to try to enter the graphics card space the recently bankrupt and acquired by Toshiba ocz claims that dubious honor maybe just maybe they'll be the first one to do it successfully because against the odds that's what we have here today the hydro gfx gtx 980ti a collaborative project between corsair and msi to make an all-in-one water-cooled video card let's find out how it performs freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized save time and get paid faster check out the link in the video description to try it for free now having originally been released nearly six months ago the gtx 980ti is a bit of a known quantity at this point so I'm not going to spend too much time on the technology but it is worth reiterating that it's a nearly full fat GM 200 Maxwell chip so the same underlying tech as the Titan X but with a few CUDA cores and texture units missing and a mere six gigs of gddr5 memory instead of 12 it's got a 250 watt TDP and the reference card is clocked at a thousand megahertz base ten seventy-five megahertz boost with the RAM at seven gigahertz regardless of what GPU boosts 2.0 is doing to balance the thermals power consumption and core clock speeds and that right there is where corsair figures their value at is something of a PC cooling specialist comes in cooler running computer hardware has always been preferable but while in the old days you had to manually turn up the speeds or overclock your components to take advantage of any additional performance headroom kepler and Maxwell architecture and video cards are able to leverage it intelligently on the fly allowing a cooler card to effectively be running at a higher speed more of the time so Corsair started then by replacing the reference cards cooler though if you ignore the illuminated NSI logo instead of an Nvidia logo and the braided tubes sticking out at the top of it I'd forgive you for not really feeling like they changed a whole lot the shape is pretty much the same but the metal housing is gone replaced unfortunately by a plastic one and the window that used to show aluminum heatsink fins now shows the GPU block and pump unit that makes up the all-in-one cooler as well as a large metal heat spreader that combined with the rear exhaust blower fend that hasn't been removed from the original design keeps the memory and power delivery components cool at the back Corsair has added a backplate that thanks fully features only a subtle overclocking emblem instead of the mishmash of logos on the front and side of the card that is probably the result of countless emails between Corsair and MSI's product management teams back to the rest of the physical tour cooling of the GPU itself is handled by a corsair h fifty-five all-in-one liquid cooling unit with a slim 120 millimeter radiator and one of Corsairs regrettably still round frame but thankfully cool-looking white LED fans overall I'd give coarser and a Massiah be for the coherency of this product looking at it it's not really clear who makes it and compared to AMD's fury X which powers the fan and the pump off the card directly rather than requiring the end-user to plug the fan into a header on the motherboard or two gigabytes water force 980ti that was just announced that uses a non reference PCB for the card itself it feels like while Corsair didn't skimp on quality this is a fairly tentative let's see how this goes foray into making graphics cards but all of that is just judging a book by its cover something I would never recommend doing as a computer enthusiast since good things can sometimes come in very unusual packages so let's talk about how then we tested the hydra GFX first we did away with the open air test bench and installed our x99 deluxe core i7 59 30 k 32 gigs of vengeance lpx memory and a X 1200 eye power supply in the cooler master master case five pro case next we had to decide what cards this monstrosity really competes with Corsairs marketing materials only really compare against a reference 980ti and then they apply a safe but definitely significant overclock only to their own so while we included all of those numbers to make things more interesting we also threw in a g1 gaming 980ti from gigabyte with their win for triple fan cooler and an AMD fury X since it's the only other all-in-one liquid cooled card that we have on hand let's start with performance thanks to its aggressive out of the box advert beuse clock of nearly 1300 megahertz this is a clear win for the hydro GFX across the board although it should be noted that its margin of victory is not as much as you might think it would be and for good reason while the hydro gfx and the fury Expo stood by far the best thermal results like we didn't see that one coming not to mention that under load they're noticeably quieter than the air-cooled cards in a well ventilated case like the mastercase 5 both the hydro fury and gigabytes open air triple fan cooler design were able to achieve well over their advertised boost clocks in our tests and ended up a mere 13 megahertz apart in our crysis 3 skybox thermal and power test and there's even more to this story yet GPU temps are one thing but we also wanted to see how the open air design would affect the temperatures of the rest of the system and grabbed CPU temps and motherboard power delivery temps while running our load tests with each of the cards and the g1 gaming though actually not as much as I expected shows in this case the trade-off that gets made when you opt for an open-air cool design versus one that either through rear exhaust directly or with the use of a radiator expels heat directly out of the case which I guess leads us to the conclusion if life were as simple as just by the best thing with money as a complete non-issue then I would be able to recommend the courser hydra GFX without any hesitation but life isn't that simple and at a price of a hundred and twenty dollars more than the cheapest reference card on Newegg and seventy dollars more than a higher tier air-cooled card like the g1 gaming from gigabyte it does become a bit harder to justify so I'll pose the question to you then the audience are you willing to spend a bit more and deal with the bulkiness of an a io cooler attached to your video card in exchange for course there's legendary support better performance and better thermals for your card and your other components or is the tax too high let us know down below in the comment and on that note today's episode sponsor is need for sitcom makers of the max anomic chairs that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind the scenes videos on the LAN show and well pretty much anywhere that I Luke or any other member of my team puts our butts down they've got a wide variety of sizes and styles available whether you're my size or Luke size and whether you want something you know just black and playing a professional looking for the boardroom or you're more into vibrant outstanding colors and this is cool if you follow them over at need for seat on Twitter I'll have that linked in the video description you'll be the first to know the details of their upcoming Black Friday promotion so if you've been thinking about upgrading your gaming chair these guys are awesome and recently outfitted our whole office with their chairs and we absolutely love them so stay tuned and check out what kind of special deals they'll have available so thanks for watching guys if you like this video then you know wait know if you disliked it then do that and then if you like to do this one not the other way around if you liked the video get subscribed 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