Gigabyte GTX 980 Waterforce Tri-SLI announced

If you have plans, and the money, to add a three of the latest GTX980 graphics cards to your system and looking to have them water cooled but don’t have the tech know-how (or are afraid) to introduce liquid to around £1500 worth of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) then Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 980 WaterForce Tri-SLI might well be the answer.

It’s big, brash and powerful and possibly one of the craziest one-box graphics solutions I have come across.

As the name suggests, you get three GeForce GTX 980 graphics cards which are cooled by a factory-fitted liquid cooling loop, which sits outside your case.

Each of the three cards packs an overclocked GTX 980 chip with a 1228 MHz core, 1329 MHz GPU Boost, and 7.00 GHz memory.

The liquid-cooling pump-block is over the GPU but the GPU base-plate also moves heat from the memory and VRM to the block using heat-pipes. This results in all the GPU components being cooled by the waterblock unlike other AIO watercooled GPU solutions.

Coolant tubes from the three cards meet at the external unit, where each GPU has its own independent 120x120mm radiator for cooling. Fan-speeds and coolant pressure of each of the three loops can be controlled at the unit’s front-panel which features an LCD display showing coolant temperature and fan-speeds.

The bundled custom 3-way SLI (Scalable Link Interface) bridge connector looks pretty natty and Gigabyte have also added a reinforcement beam to counteract PCB bending, a.k.a. card sag. These gives the internals a professional touch, although all those tubes which exit the case via the included 5.25-inch front-panel bezel to the external unit might not be to everyone’s taste. Those in to more industrial/ cyperpunk/ steampunk machines will no doubt dig it. I am sure everyone would love the power of those 3 cards though.

Gigabyte have as yet not announced pricing or availability of this unit neither have they mentioned which cases this unit will be compatible with – needless to say though, your PC case will need a flat top by the looks of things so, that’s my Storm Stryker out then.

I think that they would also do well to add a dual card version too.