CES 2015 – eVGA GeForce GTX 980 Kingpin Video Card & More

Video Card Updates

eVGA has recently released their update to the GTX 970, with the GTX 970 FTW+. It features an include backplace, improved cooling, and a base clock of 1216MHz.

Some of the improved cooling is provided by a second heatplate on the front of the PCB to cool the memory and MOSFETs. In addition, the heat pipes are straight so they should help reduce the GPU temperature as well.

eVGA was showing off a demo that shows the power consumption on their video card with the ACX 2.0, which provides for lower fan power requirements, allowing the GPU to use more power if necessary. Nice information, but does that little bit of power savings really make difference.

A prototype liquid cooled GTX 980 was shown, it is not ready for production and this might not be the final name, however it does show where eVGA is heading with an integrated liquid cooled AIO GPU solution. It has a 120mm fan attached so it should be able to fit in the back panel of most cases that would support a long video card.

It looks pretty much like every AIO CPU liquid cooler out there, with the pump and waterblock being integrated into the video card. One thing I noticed that was a nice surprise is that the tubes are wrapped rather than being left as plain rubber. The AIO liquid cooler should also be available by itself if you already own a GTX 980.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Kingpin (aka K|NGP|N) video card series is almost ready for production, it uses three PCIe power cables that has an additional power connector for a total of two 8-pin and a 6-pin.

If you are a fan of LED’s on video cards the Kingpin edition will be a dream come true. There are LED’s on the back, top and front of the video card. While they were unable to verify how they will be controlled in production, the demo card they seemed to be individually controllable so three different color settings, with RGB LEDs

The GTX 980 Kingpin Classified should be available in February, with no MSRP provided.