ZOTAC GTX 980 Ti Arctic Storm - Insane water cooled performance?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,283 words · ~6 min read
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I've seen some pretty crazy stuff in my time but it's not every day that your
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shiny new graphics card comes with a freaking cane to find out why the Zotac
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980ti comes with a cane and more about
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this card in general stay tuned if you guys would like to see a video on a
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strafe keyboard from Corsair then give that like button down there a call it's
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been a while and it misses you
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Corsair delivers real Mech or nothing with the new strafe mechanical keyboard
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featuring genuine german-made Cherry MX switches click now to learn more this
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graphics card is actually pretty standard outside of its wacky cooling
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setup which we will talk about in a moment its various clock speeds have
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been untouched sitting at the GPU core
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base clock speed of 10,25 and a boost of
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1114 it's 6 GB of gddr5 memory is
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running at 7,010 mahz which is yet again
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stock that being said we'll see what the GPU decides to do later on with GPU
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boost for your standard fixings you've got HDMI triple DisplayPort and DVI in
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the io Department in terms of connectivity the card connects to the
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motherboard through its fairly standard PCI 16x gen 3 connector power through
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one 18 pin and one six pin PCI power connector and two other potential
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graphics cards through two available SLI fingers on the top leftand Corner the
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back of the card features a beautiful and unique back plate design which
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features some kind of cool artwork Zotac branding the Arctic Storm branding logo
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and the phrase push the limit the back plate also does a little bit of
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wraparound reaching to the top of the card on the front of the card we get
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more into the cooling Powerhouse that runs this thing Zotac strapped on a
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generous offering of three large fans a whole wack ton of aluminum heat sink
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fins and a plethora of heat pipes but the card is barely running at a lower
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temperature than the stock cooler when under a load scenario of staring at The
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Crisis 3 Skybox so what gives well when cooling on air the heat from the GPU has
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to pass through the water block which doesn't have water in it not exactly an
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ideal situation Zotac makes up for this with their beastly air cooling setup but
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yeah anyways next up is that big heavy copper water block which we were just
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talking about it's been nickel plated but how does it perform quite well
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actually well enough that under looking at the Skyrim Skybox or I mean Crisis 3
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Skybox it's running at 54° C the idle
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temperatures of this thing when air cooled are 50° C that's a huge
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Improvement load it's running at 73° but that's still quite solid all this
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cooling adds quite a bit of weight how did Zotac handle this the cane what the
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hell this thing is ridiculous like okay cool you identified a problem came up
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with a solution that's great and with certain motherboard orientations you
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won't need it but the most common motherboard orientation you will now I
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prefer this idea over the cards just drooping like crazy and possibly having
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issues at this weight I would have torn it apart for being so freakishly droopy
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once installed it's scary and they fixed
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that problem so high five for that but what if I want to install two graphics
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cards what if the height of my case is kind of weird this pole only installs
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one way and it's with the bottom of it being at a fixed height I'm sure you
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could mod it to work better by drilling through the top and screwing into the
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top of your case or something and letting it hang than sawing off the
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bottom but damn that's probably a
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terrible idea honestly I'm being hard on them for this and it's a great idea I'm
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happy they implemented it but it maybe could have used some additional thought
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and some additional tooling to be more friendly to various situations now for
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performance when looking at these graphs please note that there are three
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separate entries for this card depending on whether it was tested with stock
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clocks and air cooling stock clocks and water cooling or overclocked with water
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cooling performance is rather unsurprising although I was hoping for
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GPU boost to do a little bit more than it did when it was with the added
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benefit of being underwater this just reinforces how much I'd like to test a
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whole bunch of the same graphics card to see how big of a variance GPU boost
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really is it overclocked just fine and
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as previously mentioned it kept its overall load Temps while overclocked at
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a totally acceptable 73° but it barely
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beat out the G1 gaming card in terms of overclocked performance there may have
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been a little bit more overclocking Headroom but I'm talking maybe 10 to 15
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MHz anything above that and the driver was crashing and artifacting all over
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the freaking place in conclusion it's an interesting card with some fun Concepts
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behind it the cane is a great general idea that could have maybe had some
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better implementation procedures behind it the idea of water and air cooling a
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card is great for longevity because you can use it in your main computer and
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water cool the hell out of it for now and when you retire it later there's no
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complication and you don't really need to worry about the potential of losing
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your stock cooler as you don't have to store it anywhere because it's on the
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freaking card one interesting tidbit before I go though uh I found one place
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in North America that sells it to be fair I didn't look all that hard but
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there was only 10 so good luck speaking
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only 24 bucks a month per device if you're stuck in a contract right now and
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switch to Ting they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee up to $75 head over to
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listing.com and check out their savings calculator to find out how much you
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would save compared to how much you're paying now also when you sign up at our
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link listing.com you'll save $25 in
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service credit or $25 towards a new device thanks for watching guys if this
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