MSI has announced the launch of a new special edition of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti from NVIDIA, which is the current top model of the company. The MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Golden Edition is a special variant with a copper sink, offering maximum heat dissipation and of course, since it is dressed in gold, it lives up to its name.
MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Golden Edition: The Review
The fully integrated heat sink made of copper has several advantages and some disadvantages. Typically, the copper heat pipes and these are being welded or somehow grip block of aluminum foils, which is a good transmitter of heat but not as good as copper. Using a sink made entirely of copper allows one to do soldering better and therefore, the heat dissipation is more uniform and efficient and greatly reducing the overall temperature of the device.
The drawbacks are obvious: the copper is heavier than aluminum and therefore, the final product is heavy. For instance, this GPU weighs 1,338 grams and non-copper model weighs 1,068 grams. Also, the copper is far more expensive, so integrating a heat sink made entirely of copper significantly increases the costing and therefore, sale price of the graphics card in higher than the aluminum one.
In addition to what has been said, this MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Golden Edition integrates a wide black back plate with the MSI Gaming dragon orange that covers the entire back of the PCB and also improves the aesthetics of the graphic card. On the opposite side, it incorporates two cooling fans responsible for cooling down the whole sink.
Finally, we are told that MSI has always used the best Military Class components to provide this GPU better stability and performance. It is factory overclocked and MSI has raised the operating speed of the core to the 1291 Mhz compared to 1279 Mhz reference version and 7096 MHz memory (GDDR5 effective) compared to 7010 Mhz stock.
So far MSI has not announced pricing or availability of this new graphic card but it kind of Limited Edition, so expect it to be very, very expensive.