ASUS GTX 980 Ti Poseidon Platinum Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 21.10.15Page:
The card
The DirectCU H2O cooler that comes with the Poseidon Platinum is an entirely new designed hybrid cooler, the first of its kind. The DirectCU H2O allows users to choose whether they want to chill their graphics card using air, water or even both at the same time. The cooler is made of three different parts, there is a vapor chamber, the fin stack and the face-plate with two fans. The vapor chamber is milled from copper and it's surrounded by an aluminium part that chills all the memory chips, the MOSFETs from the main power design and the core and memory voltage regulation chips via thermal pads. On top of that there are three nickel plated copper heatpipes - two with 6mm and one with 8mm diameter - that are connected to the vapor chamber and the aluminium fin stack. The fin stack which is being provided with fresh air via two 90mm fans. The fans carry the model number FDC10H12S9-C. The water channel that features standard G1/4" threaded fittings goes through the vapor chamber forming a U.
Overall the cooler is very well made. With the face-plate, it would have been a good idea if ASUS had put another screw roughly where the PCI-Express power plugs go because on our sample the face-plate was a bit loose (can be moved up and down).
The ASUS GTX 980 Ti Poseidon Platinum graphics card, or to be precise our sample of
it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'533 MHz
for the GPU and 1'774 MHz on the memory side. In order to check performance and stability we used 3DMark. With these clocks we had to feed the GPU
with 1.237 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages. We've done the overclocking tests using the watercooler and running 3DMark the card didn't exceed 45°C.
A closer look at the PCB shows that ASUS equipped this card with a 10 phase digital power design. According to ASUS there are SAP II capcitors, chockes and MOSFETs being used to make this a capable solution. Apart from that high-quality power designs guarantee lower temperatures, which results in increased life span.
Checking the voltage regulation chip, we find a digital multi-phase buck controller ASP1500U, which is taking care of power delivery to the GPU. Apart from that there is uP1641P, which is taking care of voltage regulation for the memory chips. If you want to do extreme overclocking with this card, ASUS provided this particular model with their Hotwire soldering points.
The memory chips used are made by SKHynix and carry the model number H5G04H24MFR. They are specified to run at 1'750 MHz (7'000 MHz effective).
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