With the new GeForce GTX 980 Poseidon Platinum, ASUS introduced a very interesting and unique product into market. A graphics card that can be chilled with air, water or both at the same time thanks to ASUS’ hybrid DirectCU H2O cooler. The GTX 980 Poseidon is actually the second iteration of this card and as usual, we’re curious to find out what this thing can do.
The GeForce GTX 980 Poseidon Platinum is ASUS’s second card, that ships with a waterblock from the factory. In fact, the manufacturer is using a hybrid solution, which means this card can be used water or aircooled. In this review we’re going to have a look at the performance of this beast under watercooled conditions. Apart from a highly custom cooler you get a custom PCB with beefed-up power design as well as a rather substantial factory overclock.
ASUS provided the GeForce GTX 980 Poseidon Platinum with a rather steep factory overclock. The GPU on this particular card is set to run a 1178 MHz base clock and a 1279 MHz boost clock. In the case of the maximum boost clock, which is actually achieved while gaming we see our sample running at 1305 MHz. The clock speeds we’re only lower when we were running Furmark and it this case the card was still capable of pushing out 1305 MHz. If you keep in mind, that NVIDIA’s reference card runs 1126 MHz base clock and 1216 MHz boost clock you see that ASUS’s maximum boost clock is more than 5.18 percent higher and this is going to make for a measurable difference.
Unfortunately ASUS did not overclock the 4GB of GDDR5 memory although there is quite some potential slumbering in the chips the maker is using they’re set to run at 1’753 MHz (7’012 MHz effective).
| ASUS ROG Poseidon GTX 980 | GeForce GTX 980 | GeForce GTX 780 | |
| Chip | GM204 Maxwell | GM204 Maxwell | GK110-300 Kepler |
| Process | 28 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm |
| Transistors | 5.20 billion | 5.20 billion | 7.10 billion |
| GPU clock | 1’178 MHz | 1’126 MHz | 863 MHz |
| GPU Boost clock | 1’279 MHz | 1’216 MHz | 900 MHz |
| Memory GDDR5 | 4’096 MB | 4’096 MB | 3’072 MB |
| Memory clock | 1’752 (7’010) MHz | 1’750 (7’000) MHz | 1’502 (6’008) MHz |
| Memory interface | 256 Bit | 256 Bit | 384 Bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 224’000 MB/s | 224’000 MB/s | 288’400 MB/s |
| Shader Cores | 2’048 (12 SMX) | 2’048 (12 SMX) | 2’304 (12 SMX) |
| TMUs | 128 | 128 | 192 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 48 |
| TDP | >165 Watt | 165 Watt | 250 Watt |
| PCB Type | Custom Design | Reference Design | Reference Design |
| Slots | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Cooler | DirectCU H2O | NVIDIA Reference | NVIDIA Reference |
| Launch Price | $ | $599 | $649 |