 I've seen some pretty crazy stuff in my time, but it's not every day that your shiny new graphics card comes with a freaking cane. To find out why the ZOTAC 980 Ti comes with a cane and more about this card in general, stay tuned. If you guys would like to see a video on a strafe keyboard from Corsair, then give that like button down there a call. It's been a while and it misses you. Corsair delivers real mech or nothing with their new strafe mechanical keyboard featuring genuine German made Cherry MX switches. Click now to learn more. This graphics card is actually pretty standard outside of its wacky cooling setup which we will talk about in a moment. Its various clock speeds have been untouched sitting at the GPU core base clock speed of 1025 and a boost of 1114. Its 6GB of GDDR5 memory is running at 7010MHz which is yet again stock. That being said, we'll see what the GPU decides to do later on with GPU boost. For your standard fixings, you've got HDMI, triple display port, and DVI in the I.O. department. In terms of connectivity, the card connects to the motherboard through its fairly standard PCI 16x Gen 3 connector, power through one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector, and two other potential graphics cards through two available SLI fingers on the top left hand corner. The back of the card features a beautiful and unique backplate design which features some kind of cool artwork, Zotac's branding, the Arctic Storm branding logo, and the phrase push the limit. The backplate also does a little bit of wraparound reaching to the top of the card. On the front of the card we get more into the cooling powerhouse that runs this thing. Zotac strapped on a generous offering of three large fans, a whole whack-ton of aluminum heatsink fins, and a plethora of heat pipes, but the card is barely running at a lower temperature than the stock cooler when under a load scenario of staring at the Crysis 3 skybox. So what gives? Well when cooling on air, the heat from the GPU has to pass through the water block which doesn't have water in it. Not exactly an ideal situation. Zotac makes up for this with their beastly air cooling setup, but yeah anyways. Next up is that big heavy copper water block which we were just talking about. It's been nickel plated, but how does it perform? Quite well actually. Well enough that under load looking at the Skyrim Skybox, I mean Crysis 3 skybox, it's running at 54 degrees Celsius. The idle temperatures of this thing when air-cooled are 50 degrees Celsius. That's a huge improvement. Load, it's running at 73 degrees, but that's still quite solid. All this cooling adds quite a bit of weight. How did Zotac handle this? The cane. What the hell? This thing is ridiculous. Like okay cool, you identified a problem, came up with a solution, that's great, and with certain motherboard orientations you won't need it, but the most common motherboard orientation you will. Now I prefer this idea over the cards just drooping like crazy and possibly having issues. At this weight I would have torn it apart for being so freakishly droopy once installed, it's scary, and they fixed that problem so high five for that. But what if I want to install two graphics cards? What if the height of my case is kind of weird? This pole only installs one way and it's with the bottom of it being at a fixed height. I'm sure you could mod it to work better by drilling through the top and screwing into the top of your case or something and letting it hang, then sawing off the bottom, but damn that's probably a terrible idea. Honestly I'm being hard on them for this and it's a great idea. I'm happy they implemented it, but it maybe could have used some additional thought and some additional tooling to be more friendly to various situations. Now for performance. When looking at these graphs, please note that there are three separate entries for this card depending on whether it was tested with stock clocks and air cooling, stock clocks and water cooling, or overclocked with water cooling. Performance is rather unsurprising, although I was hoping for GPU boost to do a little bit more than it did when it was with the added benefit of being underwater. This just reinforces how much I'd like to test a whole bunch of the same graphics card to see how big of a variance GPU boost really is. It overclocked just fine and as previously mentioned it kept its overall load temps while overclocked at a totally acceptable 73 degrees, but it barely beat out the G1 gaming card in terms of overclocked performance. There may have been a little bit more overclocking headroom, but I'm talking maybe 10 to 15 megahertz. Anything above that and the driver was crashing and artifacting all over the freaking place. In conclusion, it's an interesting card with some fun concepts behind it. The cane is a great general idea that could have maybe had some better implementation procedures behind it. The idea of water and air cooling a card is great for longevity because you can use it in your main computer and water cool the hell out of it for now and when you retire it later there's no complication and you don't really need to worry about the potential of losing your stock cooler as you don't have to store it anywhere because it's on the freaking card. One interesting tidbit before I go though, I found one place in North America that sells it. To be fair I didn't look all that hard but there was only 10 so good luck. Speaking of things that are awesome, Ting. Ting is a mobile carrier that focuses on customer service and customer satisfaction first and they do that in large part by having you never speak to a robot. If you call them up you'll put me put directly through to a person and that's fantastic. Also in the realm of fantastic you pay for only what you actually use. The average Ting bill is only 24 bucks a month per device. If you're stuck in a contract right now and switch to Ting they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee up to $75. Head over to linus.ting.com and try out their savings calculator to find out how much you would save compared to how much you're paying now. Also when you sign up at our link linus.ting.com you'll save $25 in service credit or $25 towards a new device. 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