Those of you true desktop enthusiast who have actually gone so far as to install a liquid cooling system on your graphics card can attest to the fact that the rather intimidating process isn’t nearly as bad as it looks. Even so, it scares many people away which is why EVGA has created the new GeForce GTX 980 Hybrid which comes with its own all-in-one liquid cooling system already installed. The GPU will you run you $650 while the standalone cooling system will run you just $100.
Have you ever tried liquid cooling a graphics card? It’s not the most difficult thing in the world, though between the water cooling loop and delicately removing the card’s stock cooling solution, it can be a little intimidating. And then there’s EVGA’s new GeForce GTX 980 Hybrid with an all-in-one water cooling already installed. All you need to do is plug the card into your mobo, feed it power, and mount the single 120mm fan radiator. There’s no filling required, no custom tubing to mess with, and no maintenance. Your reward for giving the Maxwell-based GPU a bath is significantly lower temperatures compared to Nvidia’s reference air cooler. According to EVGA’s benchmark chart, a card running at 70C degrees using a reference cooler would be under 45C with the Hybrid. The card itself comes factory overclocked. Instead of a base clockspeed of 1,126MHz and boost clock of 1,216MHz, the Hybrid runs at 1,291MHz and 1,393MHz, respectively. The 4GB of GDDR5 memory stays at stock speeds — 7,010MHz on a 256-bit bus, resulting in memory bandwidth of 224.3GB/s.