[H]ot! MSI GTX 980 Ti $570 AR at the Egg

It's a fantastic deal, but the cooling on the card is definitely lacking. At stock settings it hits its thermal wall of 83C with the fans at 85%, which are annoying audible. Mine has a fairly sweet stock voltage, though, 1.174v to reach that 1291MHz only changing to 110% power. Adding any voltage, even without changing the clock speed, though, causes the card to hit its 275w power wall.

I have the DirectCU II cooler from my Asus 780 that should fit the card, so I'm planning on trying to afro engineer it onto it. I know that it is loud as shit, as well, but it has more and much larger heatpipes and weighs almost twice as much as the MSI Armor 2x cooler. If it does cool better, I'll be flashing a BIOS that removes the boost power limit.
 
jedimasterben said:
It's a fantastic deal, but the cooling on the card is definitely lacking. At stock settings it hits its thermal wall of 83C with the fans at 85%, which are annoying audible. Mine has a fairly sweet stock voltage, though, 1.174v to reach that 1291MHz only changing to 110% power. Adding any voltage, even without changing the clock speed, though, causes the card to hit its 275w power wall.

I have the DirectCU II cooler from my Asus 780 that should fit the card, so I'm planning on trying to afro engineer it onto it. I know that it is loud as shit, as well, but it has more and much larger heatpipes and weighs almost twice as much as the MSI Armor 2x cooler. If it does cool better, I'll be flashing a BIOS that removes the boost power limit.
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So what I'm hearing is "great card if you were planning to put a waterblock on it anyway" since it's saving you like $50 over any other comparable option right now. Fair enough.
 
silent-circuit said:
So what I'm hearing is "great card if you were planning to put a waterblock on it anyway" since it's saving you like $50 over any other comparable option right now. Fair enough.
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Oh god yes, it's a steal. It is a non-reference card so it has better power delivery and a full heatsink that covers the RAM and VRMs, so you can use a universal block and just need to add a fan to the card and be good to go.
 
jedimasterben said:
Oh god yes, it's a steal. It is a non-reference card so it has better power delivery and a full heatsink that covers the RAM and VRMs, so you can use a universal block and just need to add a fan to the card and be good to go.
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I'm very happy with my Zotac AMP!s, but having now discovered what a pair of 980Tis can do I'm recommending them in like every thread where people complain about FPS and want a rebuild. Now I can recommend them $50 cheaper. ;)
 
silent-circuit said:
I'm very happy with my Zotac AMP!s, but having now discovered what a pair of 980Tis can do I'm recommending them in like every thread where people complain about FPS and want a rebuild. Now I can recommend them $50 cheaper. ;)
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Even with such a "wimpy" overclock to 1291MHz it stomps the dick off of my Asus 780 that was OCed to 1333MHz. :D
 
Is the cooler that much worse than the Twin Frozr V? I wanna go SLI with this card but I don't really wanna card that loads at 83C
 
cvinh said:
Is the cooler that much worse than the Twin Frozr V? I wanna go SLI with this card but I don't really wanna card that loads at 83C
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Yep, its not great. The cooler has four tiny heat pipes and not a lot of mass.
 
How much is each game code going for these days?

EDIT: Looks like the voucher goes for $30 or so. Not bad. Hmmm.
 
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cvinh said:
Is the cooler that much worse than the Twin Frozr V? I wanna go SLI with this card but I don't really wanna card that loads at 83C
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even the Twin Frozr V is not great, at least on my 980 Ti. it was fantastic on my previous 970 (lower TDP so it makes sense) but it's just so-so on the 980 Ti. the card linked here is a fantastic price though and if i were in market for a 980 Ti i'd bite.
 
Pretty sick deal, although the temps seem really high for a custom cooler. Can always try re-TIM'ing it and seeing if that helps, 83C is basically reference temps although this should probably still hold its boost longer before throttling.
 
chizow said:
Pretty sick deal, although the temps seem really high for a custom cooler. Can always try re-TIM'ing it and seeing if that helps, 83C is basically reference temps although this should probably still hold its boost longer before throttling.
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Noctua NT-H1 caused an increase of 2C across the board, Gelid Extreme brought it back in line with the stock TIM. Whatever MSI used on it is excellent.
 
Then again, if you trying to save money then I don't see 83C load being a huge issue provided everything else remains at acceptable temps.
 
This seems like a pretty damn good deal. I have an MSI 980ti Gaming card and its great so if this is anything like it, should be great!
 
tpctcn said:
Then again, if you trying to save money then I don't see 83C load being a huge issue provided everything else remains at acceptable temps.
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Exactly! Still a damned BEAST of a card, just not quite as beastly.

Though today I'm going to attempt to attach the DirectCU cooler from my 780 and see if that can bring the temp down :D
 
Jedimasterben, what case do you have? Good airflow around your cards?
 
don't forget to use your American express card for an additional $25 off.
 
Hulk said:
don't forget to use your American express card for an additional $25 off.
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So we're at $600, -$30 MIR, -$25 AMEX rebate, -$30 if you choose to sell the game voucher. $515 final cost for a 980Ti. That's probably better than you'll do on Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Suddenly the ~$630 I paid for mine is sounding silly.
 
silent-circuit said:
Suddenly the ~$630 I paid for mine is sounding silly.
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I know, right?? :D


So I decided to close up my 250D last night and see what happened to temperatures when using an overclock (no added voltage) on a modded BIOS, 300w default TDP/power limit, 88C maximum temperature. Three case fans pushing in (one Corsair AF140L and two Scythe GT AP-14, all full power). Program to load the GPU was Unigine Valley, maximum settings, rendering at 4096x4096 (so over twice the pixels as 4K).

IMG_20151111_192251285.jpg



A bit too much. On a whim, changed all three case fans to push out, no other changes.
IMG_20151111_195838365.jpg



Much better, though I don't think that I'll be able to realistically add much voltage to get a higher clock without it hitting the wall and pulling the clock back down.

Still not sure where the 83C I got on my open bench came from (before I'd switched to the Obsidian 250D). Maybe I didn't screw in the cooler all the way from changing the TIM?
 
Final clock speed. Modified the BIOS of the card to burn these in, no boost, and always this voltage. Raising voltage up to 1.212v gives me no additional clock headroom, this card is really a dud on air. :/

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jedimasterben said:
this card is really a dud on air. :/
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:rolleyes: i don't use the 'rolleyes' smiley much because i think it's dickish, but a 40% overclock from reference is a dud? people get tunnel vision and caught up in the minutia instead of logically thinking about what they're achieving.
 
Porter_ said:
:rolleyes: i don't use the 'rolleyes' smiley much because i think it's dickish, but a 40% overclock from reference is a dud? people get tunnel vision and caught up in the minutia instead of logically thinking about what they're achieving.
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What I'm saying is that this card has a lot of potential with the relatively low stock voltage (1300mhz at 1.164v) but the cooler is holding it back from being a 1500+ card. The VRMs will output up to 1.281v if the cooling could keep up. I'm content with the 1405 clock I got, as I'm using less power than my GTX 780 at 1333MHz and getting over 50% more performance, but it would be cool to get it even higher from such an inexpensive custom card.
 
jedimasterben said:
What I'm saying is that this card has a lot of potential with the relatively low stock voltage (1300mhz at 1.164v) but the cooler is holding it back from being a 1500+ card. The VRMs will output up to 1.281v if the cooling could keep up. I'm content with the 1405 clock I got, as I'm using less power than my GTX 780 at 1333MHz and getting over 50% more performance, but it would be cool to get it even higher from such an inexpensive custom card.
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Silicon lottery, bud. They overclock best at stock voltage.
 
After a lot of playing, at any voltage on my card, 1405MHz just was not completely stable. Bumped it all the way to 1.25v via BIOS mod and it still would artifact. Funnily enough, the most taxing thing for this GPU is going to a vendor in Fallout 4 and sitting idle with the buying screen up, that pushes the GPU to 100% usage and would show any instability almost immediately, whereas running Unigine Valley on loop at maximum settings with 4096x4096 resolution would run for hours with no artifacts.

Anyway, so I backed it down one boost bin to 1392MHz and then went back to finding the lowest voltage for that clock as possible. Ended up with 1.199v.
 
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