Gigabyte have been touring around Europe this week showing off their first own-design closed-loop water-cooler for graphics cards. Now, closed-loop liquid-chilling isn't new, even in GPU terms, but they generally come pre-installed. Gigabyte's Waterforce is designed to be easily dropped onto your graphics setup—even a multi-GPU array—and allow you to cool your GPUs far more efficiently than with active air-cooling alone. Today's graphics cards select their operating clockspeed based on a given temperature, so the cooler they are, the faster they'll run.
Gigabyte reckon that with the Waterforce cooling in place you'll hit temperatures over 40% lower than with a traditional air-cooling setup. With cooler GPUs also come quieter GPUs. Here Gigabyte reckon they can make their existing graphics cards some 13dB quieter too.
The whole Waterforce header sits atop your PC case, housing up to three water-cooling reservoirs for your GPUs with an LED readout on the front, with controls, to allow you to keep the temperatures and the fan speed under control.
You can either control each GPUs cooler individually—setting pump and fan speeds manually—or you can go for the simple GPU equalisation mode. That automatically adjusts the cooler's settings to keep each GPU running at the same temperature.
I don't have any prices yet for the WATERFORCE, but by the looks of things I wouldn't expect it to be cheap.
Gigabyte was also showing off its new spin-off gaming brand, Aorus, and their new mouse and keyboard designs.
The chunky Thunder M7 is a button-laden laser rodent designed for the MMO crowd, with a 8,200dpi maximum and the Thunder K7 is a Cherry MX Red mechanical keyboard with a detachable numpad/macro pad to allow you to use it like a compact gaming keyboard if you want. I'm a big fan of Gigabyte's Aivia Osmium keyboard and this Aorus Thunder K7 is taking most of its design cues from that fine old gaming board.
