14 DAY TRIAL // Water-cooled graphics cards exist in a significant number on the high-end video board market, even though they aren't quite ubiquitous. That is why EVGA bringing a liquid-cooler GeForce GTX 980 to CES 2015 was expected, instead of surprising.
The GeForce GTX 980 is the strongest single-chip video card which NVIDIA has in its collection at the current moment.
Even though it is powered by the second best chip in the Maxwell line, the card can beat any other video board so long, as it's powered by just one GPU.
The GM204 is the graphics processing unit in case you were wondering, with M standing for Maxwell, the name of the architecture.
The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 HydroCopper
HydroCopper is a brand that EVGA slaps onto its GPU water cooling systems, both closed-loop and standard. Or, well, some of them.
This time around, instead of a water block you would have to connect to a water cooling system, EVGA went for the all-in-one principle.
Thus, the HydroCopper keeping the edge off the new video card is a closed-loop model used much like an air-based cooler. While there is coolant flowing through the pumps, between the water block and the radiator, there is no need for an external connection to a reservoir.
All-in-one liquid coolers are literally used and sold just like an air-based model, albeit at a significantly higher price. EVGA just decided to pair it with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 from the start, as happens so often in this segment.
The cooler has a metal base plate (contacts both the memory and the VRM, the heat taken to a pump-block and an aluminum fin stack, while a common lateral-flow fan provides ventilation), while a water block is left to tend to the GPU alone (coolant flows between it an a reservoir+radiator assembly via two tubes).
The specs of the video card
They are unknown, but the printed circuit board (PCB) of the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 HydroCopper certainly looks like the stock model from NVIDIA, so EVGA might not have customized it quite to heaven and back.
We don't know the clocks, since EVGA didn't exactly release any info on the board at all, save what could be inferred from a visual examination. But the GM204 is still the GM204, so we're looking at 2,048 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface. The memory is probably the same, 4 GB VRAM as ever, running at 7 GHz.
