Why not get reference GTX 980 Ti + HYBRID Water Cooler

N

netjack

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 11, 2005
Messages
175
What are the down sides of getting the reference GTX 980 Ti (while it's in stock) and then slap on the HYBRID Water Cooler for $109 when it comes in stock?

Is it that the reference TI has lower clock speeds?
 
The downside is waiting for the Hybrid card being in stock. Also the hybrid cards have the same vrms and power delivery system as the reference cards so there's no actual difference in overclocking performance between an ACX or hybrid version of the card currently. You get the hybrid version over aftermarket air if you have a small case or airflow issues.
 
^ perfect.

That said, I don't see any reason to pay an extra $109 for EVGA's rebadged Astek cooler + glorified dwood bracket when you can pay only $20 more than reference and get something like the MSI Gaming 6G, which is apparently pretty quiet on air even at full load, and OC to within what a CLC will get you on a reference card.

I've slapped the rough equivalent of EVGA's CLC - an Antec 620 + dwood bracket - on the past three generations of Nvidia cards to great effect, but Maxwell was the first chip where I realized the chip runs cool enough that there was no point going through the trouble with CLC, because a decent aftermarket cooler (MSI Twin Frozr on a Gaming 970 in my case) just does great.
 
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It completely negates the point of even having water cooling of anything if the PCB is still reference design, its utterly retarded. And then EVGA charges the shita outa you for their REAL modified PCB's on the classified. Fuck that.
 
BlueSaber80 said:
It completely negates the point of even having water cooling of anything if the PCB is still reference design, its utterly retarded. And then EVGA charges the shita outa you for their REAL modified PCB's on the classified. Fuck that.
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Water cooling still allows for increased overclock and stability by keeping Temps down when increasing voltage and it won't sound like a hair dryer.
 
BlueSaber80 said:
I can get the same results on air for cheaper so..... no.
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How exactly do you keep a 250w+ card quiet, under load, on an air cooler? :confused:

I have yet to find an answer. Even water coolers BARELY cut it... and that still requires some modifications for truly silent-running.
 
The reason the Hybrid is more appealing (to me at least) is simply because it comes factory installed it carries the same 3 year warranty as the card. If I have an issue I send the whole thing back to EVGA. To me the price is worth the convenience. Not to mention if you buy a reference there is no backplate ($20), the AIO cooler (+100), The card itself ($650). So you'll be paying more to do it yourself rather than just have it done already OOTB.
 
Unknown-One said:
How exactly do you keep a 250w+ card quiet, under load, on an air cooler? :confused:

I have yet to find an answer. Even water coolers BARELY cut it... and that still requires some modifications for truly silent-running.
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The hybrid isnt silent either because the radiator still has a fan. The air custom cards actually are silent when idle. It's also possible to lower the fan speed in lieu of lower temperature. So yeah, I don't buy hybrid as being a complete silent solution.
 
Cyph said:
The hybrid isnt silent either because the radiator still has a fan.
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No doubt. Most AIO coolers sound like aquarium pumps and come with poor fans.

An under-volt and fan-swap can sort them out, usually. That's how I was finally able to silence my GTX 780 (and now 980 Ti) under load, an H75 with an under-volted pump and custom fans.

Cyph said:
The air custom cards actually are silent when idle. It's also possible to lower the fan speed in lieu of lower temperature.
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That only covers idle... even the reference blower is fine at idle. I asked about load temps, though...

Aftermarket air coolers dump all that heat into the case, and all my case fans spin-up to compensate (one source of noise suddenly becomes many sources of noise). This has the effect of making the nice cooler on the graphics card nearly-pointless from a noise perspective.

Any cooler that dumps heat inside the case is going to have this problem, and as a result, NOT be quiet enough for me.

Cyph said:
So yeah, I don't buy hybrid as being a complete silent solution.
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An AIO cooler is the only thing, besides the reference cooler, that dumps heat OUTSIDE the case.

Only one fan needs to spin faster when the graphics card is under load, not all of them.
 
You need airflow in the case. I have two silent 200m intake and outtake fans in my case. If your case uses your GPU to push air out, then there are airflow issues. Hybrid makes sense for small itx cases. Large cases with good airflow, it's not necessary.
 
Unknown-One said:
How exactly do you keep a 250w+ card quiet, under load, on an air cooler? :confused:

I have yet to find an answer. Even water coolers BARELY cut it... and that still requires some modifications for truly silent-running.
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Move lots of air inside your case with large fans and have large fan coolers on your GPU and customize the fan curve like mine. Coolermaster makes HAF = HIGH AIR FLOW cases for a reason. My case pumps around 150CFM with my 140mm intake fans at medium speed which don't make a lot of noise and with the 100m fans on the STRIX GPU, they don' t need to spin fast to keep my temps in the low 60'c range, even on 1470 gpu clock. Whatever heat my GPU pumps out is pushed the hell out quickly by my intake fans and through the open rear vents

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Cyph said:
You need airflow in the case.
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I have airflow. The absolute minimum airflow required, as that's the most-quiet.

A GPU cooler that dumps heat into the case requires additional airflow while under load.

Additional airflow requires higher case fan speeds.

Higher case fan speeds are unacceptable due to the added noise.

This problem instantly rules-out any GPU cooler that exhausts heat into the case on these high-TDP cards.

Cyph said:
If your case uses your GPU to push air out, then there are airflow issues. Hybrid makes sense for small itx cases. Large cases with good airflow, it's not necessary.
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Pretty obvious I don't have any airflow issues if I'm able to keep ALL of my components overclocked, cool, and near-silent... even with the GPU radiator acting as an exhaust.

Currently running in a full-ATX Fractal Design R3. Works great.

BlueSaber80 said:
Move lots of air inside your case with large fans and have large fan coolers on your GPU and customize the fan curve like mine. Coolermaster makes HAF = HIGH AIR FLOW cases for a reason
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Nope. Too loud, as a whole, while the graphics card is under load.

Also, large fans (140mm+) have, historically, been exceedingly poor performers in Silent PC Review's benchmarks. 120mm still owns the sweet spot on CFM to Noise to Static Pressure ratio.
 
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I got it for silent sli and with changing bios can hit good oc. Acx type coolers dump the hot air on the top card for sli unless you have motherboard with extra gap and case with lots of airflow. Also two or more cards will heat up the case a lot
 
BlueSaber80 said:
K well, unless you wanna build a custom passive radiator cooled water system or cover your case in soundproofing, your gonna have fan noise son.
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I customized an H75 to cool my GPU silently: Pump @ 7v, Corsair fans tossed in the trash and replaced by a a single Arctic F12... Also, my case is, in fact, lined with sound proofing material.

I have a more stringent definition of "silent" than most people, it would seem. Most cooling solutions simply aren't acceptable to me.
 
My point still stands, though. Those air coolers can't deliver exactly the same experience as a hybrid or AIO solution as far as noise-profile goes.

The simple fact that the rest of your case's cooling has to prop-up an aftermarket air cooler means that aftermarket air is, ultimately, disadvantaged when compared against an optimally-configured AIO cooler.
 
I'll take either. As long as it hits 1500mhz and last as long as i need it to.
The water cooled option would definitely accomplish it at lower temps, you can't argue that.

The quest is just finding anything in stock.
 
I prefer my computer not to sound like an aquarium, but thats just me, and radiators + cats do not mix. The fact that EVGA charges you that much more for a AIO card that still has reference PCB is just asinine and highway robbery, hence why I stopped buying their over priced and over marketed snake oil products.
 
Unknown-One said:
No doubt. Most AIO coolers sound like aquarium pumps and come with poor fans.

An under-volt and fan-swap can sort them out, usually. That's how I was finally able to silence my GTX 780 (and now 980 Ti) under load, an H75 with an under-volted pump and custom fans.


That only covers idle... even the reference blower is fine at idle. I asked about load temps, though...

Aftermarket air coolers dump all that heat into the case, and all my case fans spin-up to compensate (one source of noise suddenly becomes many sources of noise). This has the effect of making the nice cooler on the graphics card nearly-pointless from a noise perspective.

Any cooler that dumps heat inside the case is going to have this problem, and as a result, NOT be quiet enough for me.


An AIO cooler is the only thing, besides the reference cooler, that dumps heat OUTSIDE the case.

Only one fan needs to spin faster when the graphics card is under load, not all of them.
Click to expand...

You can certainly set AIO coolers as exhausts instead of intakes but AIO coolers are performance spec'd as intakes so in practice they are no different than aftermarket fans dumping heat in the case. As exhausts the air heats up in the case over time with hotter and hotter air blowing through the radiator so their performance diminishes to the point that they aren't much better than a reference cooler running at 65%+ fan speed. You can certainly increase the fan speed on the AIO but now you have a solution that's just a trade off compared to the ACX cooler--more noise in order to exhaust the heat.
 
dragonageinquisition said:
You can certainly set AIO coolers as exhausts instead of intakes but AIO coolers are performance spec'd as intakes so in practice they are no different than aftermarket fans dumping heat in the case. As exhausts the air heats up in the case over time with hotter and hotter air blowing through the radiator so their performance diminishes to the point that they aren't much better than a reference cooler running at 65%+ fan speed. You can certainly increase the fan speed on the AIO but now you have a solution that's just a trade off compared to the ACX cooler--more noise in order to exhaust the heat.
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It is about efficiency of heat removal. More fans and air moving around everywhere vs direct path of heat removal. There is no way you can argue that aio or watercooled cards are going to reach the same temperature overtime unless the setup is terrible . Noise depends more on the pump but 120 mm fans will push more air at lower db than smaller fans running faster.
 
Would a Kraken G10 bracket and a corsair AIO work on the Ti? I know they are compatible with Titan X according to NZXT's website and the TX and Ti share the same pcb. Can you still use the backplate with the NZXT bracket?

I prefer the AIO as they are quieter than fans and exhaust heat out (or can be placed on an intake).
 
I've also been looking into replacing my Gigabyte G1 with the EVGA Hybrid. The notions of pump noise becoming audible on idle does bother me as I also like my systems to be quiet.

The problem with the 980 Tis aftermarket coolers seems to be that they have a lot of heat to take out so even though they are quiet at the conservative overclocks that the cards have from factory, when you start overclocking them towards the 1500 core speeds the fans ramp up to rather rather high RPM to keep the card cool and thus get loud.

The EVGA Hybrid (and the similar one from Inno3D) should allow you to overclock as much as you can while still keeping the core cool and fans spinning at quiet levels on the radiator. The problem with them using reference boards is that the overclock potential is unlikely to be as good as on the aftermarket cards. I really don't understand why they would do it like that.
 
Hybrids are hitting 1500.

Gamernexus hit 1514
Someone on OC net got 1484, high temp of 50
50 degrees!

Question is could a custom PCB under water do even better. Is such a thing even possible?

Yes it is.
 
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