A Closer Look

Gigabyte's thermal solution uses a large copper vapor chamber baseplate without heatpipes, which not only cools the GPU chip, but also memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


The waterblock is made by Cooler Master and combines the waterblock and pump in one package; it's the same block as the one AMD uses on the Radeon R9 Fury X.


The watercooling radiator is a standard 120 mm radiator. The tubing is made from strong plastic (not rubber), which is quite stiff and somewhat difficult to bend.


Power delivery requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is specified for up to 375 W power draw.


Near the back of the card is a button that switches to an LN2-optimized BIOS, which also enables the additional 6-pin input here if you need added power input capability for an extreme overclocking session.


Gigabyte is using an uP1983A voltage controller, a rare high-end controller only the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming and ZOTAC GTX 980 Ti AMP Extreme use as well.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G41325FC-HC28. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GM200 graphics processor is the company's flagship GPU. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with a transistor count of 8.0 billion and a die size of 601 mm².