Gigabyte's GTX 980 Ti Waterforce Xtreme Gaming joins the competition for the best GTX 980 Ti with a watercooling solution that's pre-installed, pre-filled, and maintenance-free. Besides its extremely long name, the card comes with a large overclock out of the box, on both GPU and memory, which makes it faster than any other GTX 980 Ti we tested so far. Compared to the GTX 980 Ti reference design, the increase is 21% at 4K, which is probably similar to the performance uplift we can expect from NVIDIA's next-generation Pascal cards. Compared to the GTX Titan X, the Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti is a whopping 14% faster - at a fraction of the price. AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X is 17% behind, and the gap widens to 20% at lower resolutions. Overall, this makes the Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti Waterforce the fastest GTX 980 Ti we tested so far, slightly ahead of MSI and ZOTAC.

Gigabyte's choice for watercooling is interesting. While every other major board partner chose to go triple-slot with more powerful coolers, Gigabyte opted for watercooling. While watercooling transports a lot of heat quickly, its drawback is the pump that is always running, which means you will never achieve the golden silence other models offer in idle and light gaming. Also, the watercooling radiator needs to be installed somewhere, which means extra space inside a case is required. On the other hand, as mentioned before, the card only requires two slots, which could be a deciding factor if you have single-slot spacing on your motherboard and plan on installing additional PCIe devices, like a sound card. The watercooling assembly, made by Cooler Master, works well and feels sturdy, though the tubes are maybe a bit too rigid as they are not very easy to bend, but better be safe than sorry, I guess.
What's also important to highlight is that Gigabyte doesn't use a fan on the graphics card, which is possible because the waterblock not only cools the graphics chip, but also memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry. The fan on the radiator is temperature controlled and has decent settings. However, it is not as quiet as other custom-design GTX 980 Tis with air-cooling (MSI Lightning, Palit SuperJetStream) while gaming.

An interesting side effect of watercooling is that power efficiency has gone way up. Because the GPU never reaches temperatures above 50°C, it will run at much better efficiency (every chip uses less power for the same task when it's at lower temperature). Overclocking, on the hand, reaches similar (good) results as comparable cards, so there is no hidden magic here.

Gigabyte is asking $720 for their GTX 980 Ti WaterForce, which I find to be a reasonable price. Competing cards, like the MSI Lightning and ASUS Matrix, are sitting at around $780. On the lower end of the price spectrum, you will find Palit's SuperJetStream and the Zotac AMP Extreme ($680). All of these cards have their strengths and weaknesses, so the choice is yours as all GTX 980 Ti cards are fantastic.

Update Jan 2016: Gigabyte has informed me that they have found the source of the pump noise and replaced that component with a higher quality one, for mass production.