 Now Corsair didn't invent the business model of starting out hawking ram sticks with shiny heat spreaders on them and then expanding into other product categories, but what they've certainly done is made an art form out of doing it well. So while Corsair isn't the first of the companies that made enthusiast PC memory to try to enter the graphics card space, the recently bankrupt and acquired by Toshiba OCZ claims that dubious honor, maybe, just maybe, they'll be the first one to do it successfully. Because against the odds, that's what we have here today. The Hydro GFX GTX 980 Ti, a collaborative project between Corsair and MSI to make an all-in-one water-cooled video card. Let's find out how it performs. Music FreshBooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized, save time, and get paid faster. Check out the link in the video description to try it for free. Now having originally been released nearly six months ago, the GTX 980 Ti is a bit of a known quantity at this point, so I'm not going to spend too much time on the technology, but it is worth reiterating that it's a nearly full-fat GM200 Maxwell chip, so the same underlying tech as the Titan X, but with a few CUDA cores and texture units missing, and a mere 6GB of GDDR5 memory instead of 12. It's got a 250W TDP, and the reference card is clocked at 1000MHz base, 1075MHz boost, with the RAM at 7GHz, regardless of what GPU Boost 2.0 is doing to balance the thermals, power consumption, and core clock speeds. And that right there is where Corsair figures their value at as something of a PC cooling specialist comes in. Cooler-running computer hardware has always been preferable, but while in the old days you had to manually turn up the speeds or overclock your components to take advantage of any additional performance headroom, Kepler and Maxwell architecture Nvidia cards are able to leverage it intelligently on the fly, allowing a cooler card to effectively be running at a higher speed more of the time. So Corsair started then by replacing the reference card's cooler, though if you ignore the illuminated NSI logo instead of an Nvidia logo, and the braided tube sticking out of the top of it, I'd forgive you for not really feeling like they changed a whole lot. The shape is pretty much the same, but the metal housing is gone, replaced unfortunately by a plastic one, and the window that used to show aluminum heatsink fins now shows the GPU block and pump unit that makes up the all-in-one cooler, as well as a large metal heat spreader that, combined with the rear exhaust blower fan that hasn't been removed from the original design, keeps the memory and power delivery components cool. At the back, Corsair has added a backplate that thankfully features only a subtle overclocking emblem instead of the mishmash of logos on the front and side of the card that is probably the result of countless emails between Corsair and MSI's product management teams. Back to the rest of the physical tour, cooling of the GPU itself is handled by a Corsair H55 all-in-one liquid cooling unit with a slim 120mm radiator and one of Corsair's regrettably still round frame, but thankfully, cool-looking white LED fans. Overall, I'd give Corsair and MSI a B for the coherency of this product. Looking at it, it's not really clear who makes it, and compared to AMD's Fury X, which powers the fan and the pump off the card directly, rather than requiring the end user to plug the fan into a header on the motherboard or to Gigabyte's WaterForce 980 Ti that was just announced that uses a non-reference PCB for the card itself, it feels like while Corsair didn't skimp on quality, this is a fairly tentative, let's see how this goes, foray into making graphics cards. But all of that is just judging a book by its cover, something I would never recommend doing as a computer enthusiast, since good things can sometimes come in very unusual packages. So let's talk about how, then, we tested the Hydro GFX. First, we did away with the open-air test bench and installed our X99 Deluxe Core i7-5930K, 32GB of Vengeance LPX memory and AX1200i power supply in a Cooler Master MasterCase 5 Pro case. Next, we had to decide what cards this monstrosity really competes with. Corsair's marketing materials only really compare against a reference 980 Ti, and then they apply a safe but definitely significant overclock only to their own, so while we included all of those numbers to make things more interesting, we also threw in a G1 Gaming 980 Ti from Gigabyte with their WinForce Triple Fan Cooler and an AMD Fury X, since it's the only other all-in-one liquid-cooled card that we have on hand. Let's start with performance. Thanks to its aggressive, out-of-the-box advertised boost clock of nearly 1300 MHz, this is a clear win for the Hydro GFX across the board, although it should be noted that its margin of victory is not as much as you might think it would be, and for good reason. While the Hydro GFX and the Fury X posted by far the best thermal results, like we didn't see that one coming, not to mention that under load they're noticeably quieter than the air-cooled cards, in a well-ventilated case like the Master Case 5, both the Hydro Fury and Gigabyte's OpenAir Triple Fan Cooler design were able to achieve well over their advertised boost clocks in our test and ended up a near 13 MHz apart in our Crysis 3 SkyBox thermal and power test. And there's even more to this story yet. GPU temps are one thing, but we also wanted to see how the OpenAir design would affect the temperatures of the rest of the system and grabbed CPU temps and motherboard power delivery temps while running our load test with each of the cards. And the G1 gaming, though actually not as much as I expected, shows, in this case, the trade-off that gets made when you opt for an OpenAir-cooled design versus one that either through rear exhaust directly or with the use of a radiator expels heat directly out of the case. Which I guess leads us to the conclusion. If life were as simple as just buy the best thing with money as a complete non-issue, then I would be able to recommend the Corsair Hydro GFX without any hesitation. But life isn't that simple, and at a price of $120 more than the cheapest reference card on Newegg and $70 more than a higher-tier air-cooled card like the G1 gaming from Gigabyte, it does become a bit harder to justify. So I'll pose the question to you then, the audience. Are you willing to spend a bit more and deal with the bulkiness of an AIO cooler attached to your video card in exchange for Corsair's legendary support, better performance, and better thermals for your card and your other components? Or is the tax too high? Let us know down below in the comments. And on that note, today's episode sponsor is NeedForSeat.com, makers of the Maxonomic chairs that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind-the-scenes videos on the WAN show and, well, pretty much anywhere that I, Luke, or any other member of my team puts our butts down. They've got a wide variety of sizes and styles available, whether you're my size or Luke's size, and whether you want something, you know, just black and plain and professional looking for the boardroom, or you're more into vibrant, outstanding colors. And, this is cool, if you follow them over at NeedForSeat on Twitter, I'll have that linked in the video description. You'll be the first to know the details of their upcoming Black Friday promotion. So if you've been thinking about upgrading your gaming chair, these guys are awesome and recently outfitted our whole office with their chairs, and we absolutely love them. 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