Do you anticipate EVGA to release a xx80 Pascal Classified Card with a Waterblock?

[rapman4488]

I currently have a GTX 970 and am very happy with it. I usually upgrade my GPU every new generation and sell my old one on eBay to salvage some money (I usually get back 50% or more on the original purchase price which is pretty good). I am planning to upgrade to Pascal when it is released but because it will be such a huge upgrade with the huge die shrink (28nm to 16nm) and because it might be the first time GPU's are better than the games that they run, I think I might go all out on a very high end card and keep it for 3 years. I currently have just my CPU watercooled and want to expand to my GPU being watercooled in the future as I love overclocking and the aesthetics of watercooling. However, I do not want to watercool a GPU that won't have lots of OC potential and spend a $150 premium on a waterblock when I won't get any performance benefit. I have looked at trends of EVGA's product lines in the past and their CLASSIFIED series appeals to me perfectly. The KINPIN edition is way to expensive for me and I'm paying for OC potential that I won't use (Max OC potential utilized with LN2 for KINGPIN). Therefore, I thought a good idea was to get a Pascal CLASSIFIED card with a waterblock pre installed like the Hydro Copper. But I don't think this is the case and I don't want to waste money on the hefty aftermarket heatsink that the CLASSIFIED series provides if I am going to remove it and put on a waterblock. The Hydro Copper edition looks nice but it has wasted OC potential for water with not many pins on it (GTX 980 HC has 6+6 pin as opposed to CLASSIFIED 8+8 pin). Should I just get the next version of CLASSIFIED and wait for the compatible waterblock to come out? I'm not sure if I will have the money to do this as a high end CLASSIFIED card usually has a very high launch price. Thank you.

 

[renz496]

For 980 i don't think having two 8 pin config on the card will give significant advantage over two 6 pin unless you want to break world record using LN2. All that extra power usually will only going to significantly increase power consumption with very minimal performance increase or next to none. Not to mention ever since kepler nvidia are limiting their cards in regards to overvolting. To break this limitation you need to use modded bios which will void your warranty.