The main draw of the Hybrid is clearly its cooling solution, a value-add that will reduce internal case temperatures – useful especially in SFF or shoebox builds – and theoretically increases OC headroom with better thermal management. The Hybrid's core clock is actually 50MHz lower than EVGA's 970 SSC (1190MHz), effectively guaranteeing lower stock FPS throughput than a device that runs $50 cheaper. And that's just one company – between MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, PNY, and the half-dozen other manufacturers, clock frequencies scale nearly 200MHz from reference. EVGA's lineup alone contains cards with clocks at 1050MHz (stock) for around $310, 1165MHz cards (“ SC Gaming”) at $345, 1190MHz cards (“SSC”) at $350, and now the GTX 970 Hybrid (1140MHz) at $400. EVGA GTX 970 Hybrid SpecsĪt its reference clocks, the original GTX 970 oscillated at 1050MHz base, 1178MHz boost. In this review of EVGA's GTX 970 Hybrid, we benchmark stock and overclocked performance in games (FPS), temperatures, and power consumption. More work than required for an air-cooled card, but even those face decay from prolonged service life (often thermal compound or pads need to be re-applied).Īt the surface, the GTX 970 Hybrid doesn't appear to like an application where “liquid makes sense.” That's what testing is for, and we'll look at use case scenarios for overclocking, ultra-low thermal systems, SFF rigs with thermal concerns, and more. The issue is further diminished by just how easy it is to maintain these things: popping in a new cooler will get it up-and-running again, and they're fairly standardized (in the case of the 970 Hybrid or Sea Hawk, anything by Asetek will work). I'd imagine that most of our audience aims to build or upgrade systems at least once within a five-year period, perhaps mitigating the impact of this consideration. Most CLCs, depending on supplier (read about who really makes liquid coolers), are only good for a few years – five, on average – and that's undesirable to users seeking serious endurance. CLCs drive the BOM up, increasing what the user pays for the solution. This is thanks to an avoidance of thermal throttling of the clock, meaning we become more limited by overall chip stability and BIOS vCore locks.īut liquid doesn't always make sense. We mostly called attention to the obvious thermal reduction on the silicon, increased power efficiency by reducing capacitor leakage, and the ability for high-heat, “Big GPUs” to push more substantial overclocks. With the MSI Sea Hawk 980 Ti, we explained why CLC systems for GPUs make excellent sense in the correct use case scenario. They've existed before, but never to the level of publicity as spurred-on by AMD's Fury X and nVidia's high-end Maxwell board partners. Liquid-cooled graphics cards have blown up over the past year.
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