has anyone water cooled a 970 yet

[synergygreen459]

ek lists this waterblock as compatible with the asus strix gtx 970 EK-FC670 GTX DCII - Nickel. Has anyone experienced this first hand or has pictures of someone who has id like to see for sure it works before i buy the strix.

I dont want to spend the money to buy this card if i cant do the loop i want.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I haven't seen any EK Blocks available for purchase yet for the 970 ... just the 980

The Asus Strix will be a much better card under water as the cooling of PCB components is a bit lacking.

Might wanna read this and see if anything might be a concern if you looking for big OCs
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2014/09/19/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-review/2

 

[terroralpha]

you are wasting your time. the only thing that is holding back a GTX 970 from going faster is the max power target and voltage offset.

i have a pair of MSI GTX 970 gaming cards. even with voltage and power target cranked up to the max, i never went over 65*C even under 100% load. and i can't even hear the card's coolers over the gentle whisper of the H110 cooling my CPU.

the reference boost speed for a GTX 970 is 1178MHz. mine are running at 1500MHz. that's a 27% overclock. and i have no doubt in my mind that they can go faster if the BIOS would allow the higher voltages.

the only thing you will achieve by water cooling a non reference GTX 970 is that you will make it louder, spend hundreds of extra dollars and burn several hours of your time. that's it. if you want a faster card just buy a non reference GTX 980 and overclock that.

only if you can bump the voltage by 150mV and set the power target to 150% will water cooling become useful.

otherwise, if you are simply hellbent on water cooling something, pick up an R9 290x. those guys go pretty cheap these days and they actually need the water cooling.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

i have a pair of MSI GTX 970 gaming cards. even with voltage and power target cranked up to the max, i never went over 65*C even under 100% load. and i can't even hear the card's coolers over the gentle whisper of the H110 cooling my CPU.

the only thing you will achieve by water cooling a non reference GTX 970 is that you will make it louder, spend hundreds of extra dollars and burn several hours of your time. that's it. if you want a faster card just buy a non reference GTX 980 and overclock that.

I agree that with the MSI card at least you are unlikely to get higher clocks on water than air..... same was true of the MSI 780 .... but on the Asus 780 I was able to go up a bit higher because while the Asus GPU was fine, the VRM and VRAM temps were high .... MSI does a better job of cooling those than Asus does nowadays.

But you certainly won't make your system louder by water cooling the GFX cards, I have no "gentle whispers" coming from my box .... I have 10 rad fans and 5 case fans and sitting at my desk you can't tell if the system is on or off using your ears.

And while I did it for noise reduction, you certainly can change the BIOS which will add that voltage and reset the targets. I'm running the two 780s at 34C with VRM temps in the mid 50s.... the MSI 970 PCB has hot spots in the hitting 82C as I recall running at "outta the box" clocks..