GTX 980 Water Block Options (So Far)

So it’s been a few weeks and more water blocks are now appearing.  EK as usual was the first out the gate with it’s block available as soon as the NDA was up:

Not only is it yet another sexy block, but we finally see EK bringing in the jetplate technology that was first used in the CPU blocks and then the Thermosphere universal GPU block. The jetplate does two things – firstly it directs the water to the center of the channels meaning that the hottest part of the die would get the the coolest coolant, secondly a jetplate increases local flowrate (and therefore hopefully cooling) at the cost of overall restriction. The block also comes in the wide variety of options (copper, acetal full cover and CSQ):

Lastly the backplate is also now available:

We are happy to see the backplate now come in even more colors: black, red, gold, blue, nickel! Sadly there is no active backplate though the 980 is so low power it will not be needed. These are all available today!

AquaComputer’s 980 block has been pictured in copper (we also expect nickel versions) but is not available yet to buy:

We will also see active and passive backplates again!

Koolance’s 980 block has also been shown off and is due on Oct 13th:

The website claims that it does come with a backplate for the rear memory chips apparently, but there are no memory chips on the rear of the PCB. We expect this text is leftover from the Titan/TitanBlack.

Alphacool have possibly the easiest time launching a new block as they reuse the same core and just make a new aluminum adapter plate:

After the incompatability issues we had – we made some recommendations to alphacool and the new backplates should be much more compatible now though we haven’t seen the final product yet.

XSPC should also be ready on October 15th though we haven’t seen a picture of the final product yet only a render:

EVGA also have their hydrocopper 980 card which uses an EK waterblock with a non standard EK bridge:

Bear in mind that the cooling core does not use the same jetplate style that was used in the EK 980 block, but the traditional core cooling style used in previous blocks. The block design is similar in style to the titan z and is aesthetically pleasing. The bridge however is quite ugly with the widely spaced ports that have too many options! Although this was pictured a while back, it still is not available to buy. We expect this design to perform a bit worse than the newer EK one.

Swiftech

Swiftech showed their 980 block also which follows the same design language as the R9-290 block that we reviewed:

Swiftech claim availability around the 24th of October, but all of their recent products have been quite behind their announced schedule. We expect this to be late. However given the low power consumption then Swiftech’s poor VRM cooling will probably not be a concern and so this should review quite well. It will however probably be the most expensive block.

Bitspower

No word on date yet, but a very basic render and “soon” coupled with Bitspower usually being quite late means this might not be here for a while:

That’s all we have for now! We will be doing a full review of these. We also expect Watercool to be available soon even though we haven’t seen any teasers!