MSI / Corsair GTX 980 Ti Thermals Over Time & at Equilibrium
At equilibrium, the Sea Hawk GTX 980 Ti operates at about 40C delta T over ambient (21.6C), a 21.4C improvement over the reference nVidia 980 Ti cooler. The Hybrid nearly doubles that gap, though, with its 22.9C dT thermal performance.
The difference rests in the heatsink design, as we described above. EVGA's Hybrid utilizes a custom GPU cooling block with a large, unibody copper extrusion. Fan differences can also impact thermal performance.
Our Thermals Over Time bench is complete, but pending review by MSI & Corsair. We observed temperature fluctuation which suggests aggressive fan RPM modulation throughout the test. We will edit this post once we have heard back and validated the results.
MSI / Corsair GTX 980 Ti Power Draw
Our power benchmark measures total system load, which is the total power draw of the complete system when under full gaming load. Load is generated using FireStrike Extreme's “combined” tests (CPU + GPU) on loop.
The total system power draw with the Sea Hawk is just 392.76W (averaged, peak outlier was 406W), easily allowing users to build a high-end system with a 550W-600W PSU (leaving room for peak load).
Continue to Page 3 for the FPS & overclocking benchmarks!
