Hardware & Technical Off the shelf water cooled GPU options?

Porina · Aug 16, 2015

I've finally started ordering bits for my new desktop build. After coming across the Corsair Carbide Air 540 case, I thought I'd give water cooling another go. Hope the current closed systems are easier to maintain (that is, zero) than my previous home brew attempts. But if I'm doing the CPU, logically I should also do the GPU.

Here is where I could use another set of eyes. As hashed out in another thread, my ideal card would be a 980Ti. The snag is, I haven't located one of those with water cooling at a reasonable price. The few water cooled 980 non-Ti I found are costing about as much as a 980Ti on air. I really don't want to go the DIY approach to water.

So that leaves me looking back to the Fury X. For the money and performance level, it would be far cheaper than any water cooled nvidia equivalent, unless anyone knows of something I missed?

Porina · Aug 21, 2015

Still looking.

After some more random poking around the interwebs I found "Inno3D GeForce GTX 980Ti Hybrid Black Edition" which does what it says on the tin. The hybrid cooler seems to use air over the ram/power delivery on the card, and the water cooling is applied to the GPU core itself. So far only found in stock at one UK supplier at £630 which isn't as bad as the ones I found previously and brings it close to the upper end of the Fury X pricing.

Haven't ruled out the Fury X though. Availability still seems to be limited if you want a good price. You can easily find them in stock around £600. Some are listed as low as £510, but of course the cheaper ones are out of stock. Hard to be 100% sure but are all the current ones using the same reference design? They look pretty similar to me so I'm debating if it is worth holding out for a bigger brand like Asus (again, limited supply) or go for more readily available like PowerColor?

Other minor factor to consider might be how well these cards *might* do once DX12 content becomes more widely available. Would the 4GB of the Fury X become limiting within its reasonable lifespan? That is, would 6GB on the 980Ti be a bit more future resistant? If anyone pays close attention to the rumour mill, when are nvidia/AMD's next gen GPUs (hopefully on a smaller manufacturing process) likely to appear? I know there's the never ending danger of waiting for the next best thing around the corner but a 3rd option I haven't ruled out is to get something else cheaper in the short term. If I go top end now, I will likely stick with it for a long time.

#firstworldproblems

Surfinjo · Aug 21, 2015

Haven't got into water cooling myself, though always intended to, one day.

This looks good. Kudos for your home brew attempts.

Porina · Aug 25, 2015

Fury X arrived today. Not had it installed long and already it is too annoying I want to put my 960 back in. It as far too noisy. I don't mean the expected noises, but unexpected ones. There's a constant 8kHz whine from the card and the fan on the radiator makes a mechanical whine (like a dying hard disk) at certain speeds.

Edit: in a quick search the pump whine seems to be a known issue with early cards but is supposed to be fixed for production ones. Regardless of that, I still have unacceptable fan noises.

adoredtv · Aug 25, 2015

Porina said:
Fury X arrived today. Not had it installed long and already it is too annoying I want to put my 960 back in. It as far too noisy. I don't mean the expected noises, but unexpected ones. There's a constant 8kHz whine from the card and the fan on the radiator makes a mechanical whine (like a dying hard disk) at certain speeds.

Edit: in a quick search the pump whine seems to be a known issue with early cards but is supposed to be fixed for production ones. Regardless of that, I still have unacceptable fan noises.

Just RMA it, it's pure pot luck with any high-end card and coil whine.

Although it's not watercooled you might want to wait 2 days until the Nano reviews are out as well.

Porina · Aug 25, 2015

Intend to RMA but ask for refund. In reading around, it is the pump itself and not the coils in this case. If I'm going back to air, it is back to nvidia.

Porina · Aug 27, 2015

The Fury X is packed and ready to be collected to go back tomorrow, however there hasn't been any discussion of what will happen next. I did include a comment that if they replace it, I hope they check the replacement does not suffer the same problem before sending it to me. This will take up to 5 working days from when they get it so I'm not expecting anything until towards end of next week.

I also see the Fury Nano has been announced. The 100W less TDS sounds tempting, up to the point where it has been stated that under gaming loads it is expected the clocks will thermally limit to an estimated 900MHz (compared to the X's 1050). Assuming I get another X back at some point, I wonder if it works the other way around too. Could I underclock that to 900, and hopefully get a nice power saving when the power isn't required? The nano is supposed to get the best binned chips so would likely keep a power/performance benefit, but getting closer wouldn't be too bad.

I only did a quick ED benchmark with the X at 1080p, and the gains from the X over a GTX 960 were very small at 155 and 133fps respectively. I forgot to try a run at my monitor native resolution though which might have pushed things harder and show more improvement.

adoredtv · Aug 27, 2015

Any of the Fury's will destroy a 960 at 4K, which is presumably the reason you bought the card. You should be able to downclock a Fury X if you want to yes though I'm unsure about undervolting it as well. However if you'd rather have the Nano I'd contact them and tell them that. The Nano likely uses the best silicon of the lot, undervolted compared to the Fury X. Don't expect a big difference in price as it's probably the best performing perf/Watt card in existence.

You might also just take a look at the Fury non-X, like the Sapphire one which is supposedly quieter at load than some 980's are at idle (it's got a really big cooler).

Porina · Aug 27, 2015

My monitor is about 60% of 4k in pixel count, so about 2.5x more demanding than 1080p, but easier than 4k. If there is enough power left I'd like to run DSR (or whatever the AMD version is called).

Back to the GTX 960, I managed to acquire another one for the short term to tide me over until the Fury X issue is resolved. So now I can run them in SLI. I had some weird red flashing at first, which a quick search showed was a bad SLI bridge connection. Reseated it and all was fine. The ED benchmarks surprised me though. I was getting over 85% fps increase in framerate at both 1080p and 3440x1440 native. That's pretty good scaling. Of course this is not a long term solution, since the two together would run a combined TDP more than the Fury X by itself, and they're only 2GB cards. Other game performance may vary. I'm more interested at getting the minimum up, as it dropped in station to ~40fps with a single. Need to try that again but not done so yet.

The Nano may have launched but it isn't listed yet where I got the Fury X.

Porina · Aug 28, 2015

Ok, Fury Nano isn't going to be around for another couple of weeks it seems.

Also seem to have hit vram limit with the 960 SLI.

adoredtv · Aug 28, 2015

85% does seem pretty good but it's like you said, the minimums are what counts. More often than not SLI and Crossfire make minimums worse.

Yeah I found out Nano won't be out until the 10th of September so that's out, presumbly. I don't know if it's a VRAM limitation on the 960 or a bandwidth limitation. I suspect that even if you had a 4GB 960 it would be running out of legs at your resolution, more so at 4K.

My ancient 1GB 7850 can run Eyefinity resolution (5200x1000) on low/medium settings, obviously with drops in stations and RES. I don't think ED is that hard on VRAM tbh.

If you're not bothered about VR then a 980 Ti would be a good bet imo. AMD looks good for DX12 but I don't think it'll be huge or anything. That said, the Fury's are great cards too especially at higher resolution.

Porina · Aug 28, 2015

It was 50/50 if I went Fury X or 980Ti since they're near enough the same price bracket. What swung it for me towards the Fury X was the watercooling, so when that turned out unacceptably noisy it was a major disappointment. I found it hard to get a feel for what noise levels were present on 980Ti cards, as there were so many different designs which were not limited to a single reference design. I suppose I could have compared against my R9 280X which has a TDP in a similar ball park. While not silent under load, the noise at least isn't as annoying as the Fury X's pump. Oh, if my PSU monitor is correct, the increase in power draw while the Fury X was running was well over 300W (furmark).

I'm fairly certain the 960 is running out of vram. In the past I had seen the 280X (3GB) go up to about 2.3GB from memory while in ED. If I fire up GPU-Z the 960 is indicated as using 2046MB in game so that's essentially maxed out. Like I said, this is not a long term solution, but it is a learning experience regardless.

What I see as example, I start the flight training mission which starts you off in station. Initial fps will be around low 20's and it stays that way for quite a while, maybe 30 seconds or a minute. Then it will go up to 80's. If I launch this generally holds and I leave the slot. If I then face the planet, I get another similar drop back to 20's, lasting for a similar time before returning to 80's. I'm speculating it is having to move the appropriate textures out of system ram as it doesn't have enough on GPU. I don't remember seeing this with a single 960 so I can speculate either it is made worse due to some other overhead in SLI, or perhaps it is more of a bandwidth limitation due to SLI.

Porina · Sep 2, 2015

Still no news on the Fury X RMA, but there was an interesting development toady. I got given a 980Ti as a late birthday present. It's the standard Asus (non-strix) with what I guess is the reference blower on it so I was wondering what the noise levels might be like on that. Well, as long as the loading isn't too high and fans keep below 2000rpm or so, I can't hear it over the case fans anyway. After doing some routine exploring then nipping into a quick round of CQC deathmatch, fan speeds topped out around 1700rpm, 2.5GB ram used, 67% GPU load and 72% TDP. This was limited by vsync to 60Hz from which it never dropped. This will do

Porina · Sep 3, 2015

Fury X RMA has been processed and I got a refund, so that ends that short chapter.

Because the 980Ti I got appears to be a reference design, there are aftermarket water cooling solutions for it in case I feel a need for it later. A nice 280mm radiator would do a lot better than the tiny one on the Fury X would too.