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Gigabyte equipped their new GeForce GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming with the
latest version of their own cooler, which is called WindForce 3X 600W. It
features five 8mm and one 6mm copper heatpipes, which have all been routed through a copper base plate. The copper base established contact to the GPU as well as the memory. Soldered to the heatpipes, there is a large and dense fin
stack which is being cooled by three 80mm fans. The fans only spin when the chip passes a certain temperature, thus cooling the card passively when it's in idle. In order to keep the VRM area cool, there is an additional metal plate, which is in contact with the heatpipes, to also provide active cooling to this part of the graphics card.
The Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming graphics card, or to be precise our sample of
it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'513 MHz
for the GPU and 1'800 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D
benchmark with 15 minutes duration. With these clocks we had to feed the GPU
with 1.243 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages.
A closer look at the PCB shows that Gigabyte equipped this card with a
8+2+2 phase digital power design. The GPU gets its current from eight phases, two phases take good care of the 6GB of GDDR5 memory and two additional phase are in charge of PLL. Once more, Gigabyte is using high quality chokes.
Checking the voltage regulation chip, we find a digital multi-phase buck
controller NCP8114.
The memory chips used are made by SKHynix and carry the model number
H5GQ4H24MFR. They are specified to run at 1'750 MHz (7'000 MHz
effective)