Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 and 980 reference review - Product Showcase

One of the key ingredients to the GTX 970 and 980 is their high performance vapor chamber cooling. Built from copper, this vapor chamber draws heat off the GM204 GPU using an evaporation process that’s similar to a heatpipe, but more powerful. Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters Nvidia will try to force as much performance out of the cards at a maximum threshold of 80 Degrees C.

With new grease and the copper vapor chamber, they’re able to draw more heat off the GM204 chip over the older designs, ultimately allowing the GPU to run cooler and thus boost to higher clock speeds. This heat from the vapor chamber is then dissipated by a large, dual-slot aluminum heatsink. 

 

GeForce GTX 980 also features an extended fin stack, the heatsink fins actually extend beyond the base of the vapor chamber, increasing cooling area. The GeForce GTX 970 and 980 cards also have an aluminum base-plate, which provides additional cooling for the PCB and board components. And finally, a blower-style fan exhausts hot air out the back of the system chassis. Underneath the GeForce GTX 980’s metal shroud lies an aluminum heatsink. Embedded in the base of this heatsink are three copper heatpipes which are responsible for drawing heat off the GPU. Both cards will have two 6-pin PEG power connectors, and yes, there's plenty room left for overclocking. 

A 4+1 phase power supply is responsible for supplying the GPU and memory with power. One additional phase power supply is dedicated for the board’s GDDR5 memory. 
 

This 4+1 phase design supplies the product with the power it needs. Tweaked we’ve seen boards with reference cooling hit speeds of over 1.4 GHz in our own testing! In fact, with some custom boards we've already reached 1.5 GHz!!