Gigabyte launches water-cooled Geforce GTX 980 Waterforce Tri-SLI

In the first incarnation of Gigabyte’s lavish water cooling package Waterforce, no less than three Geforce GTX 780 Ti were used. Following the launch of the Maxwell architecture, it is now time for the Taiwanese component giant to upgrade to the new Geforce GTX 980 and squeeze out even more performance.

The new Geforce GTX 980 Waterforce Tri-SLI with the cryptic model name Gigabyte GV-N980X3WA-4GD combines three graphics cards with a really lavish water cooling system. The graphics cards are cooled by solid water blocks connected to individual radiators in the size class 120 millimeters. These are housed in a free-standing chassis together with three fans.

The main unit with its display and knobs makes it possible to individually adjust fan and pump speeds and read all important values. For example, you can choose from a number of predefined modes or manually balance performance by temperature and sound level.

The graphics cards are also overclocked from the factory, where Gigabyte turns up the graphics processors to 1 228/1 329 MHz at base respective boost while the memory remains at the 7.0 GHz GDDR5 of the reference model. Thanks to “hand-picked” circuits, however, there should be significantly larger turning space than that.

More details are a tailored SLI bridge, an associated support and video outputs with support for up to four screens via various combinations of DVI, HDMI and Displayport. Gigabyte, however, does not reveal the price or date of the start of sales.