Sea Hawk water-cooled GPU is MSI and Corsair’s latest duo offering

By Jon Martindale September 17, 2015

msi corsair water cooled gtx 980 ti hydro — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The GTX 980 Ti is already one of the world’s most powerful graphics cards, but performance alone isn’t always enough to draw in buyers, so MSI has announced a new version of the GPU that it’s built in conjunction with Corsair, known as the Sea Hawk. It’s a card with boosted clocks and a combination or air and water cooling in one compact package.

The MSI Sea Hawk comes fitted with Corsair’s H55 all-in-one liquid cooling system, mounted to a custom cooling bracket. It hooks up straight to the GPU core itself, making sure that part of the card stays nice and cool, while a standard air-blowing impeller helps cool the memory and PWM area.

Thanks to the advanced cooling on this GPU, MSI has upped the clock speed for the core to 1,190Mhz, which is nearly a 20 percent increase over stock clocks on Nvidia’s reference board. Similarly so, the memory has been increased to 1,291MHz, though MSI has said that both it and the core should be able to go further because of the comfortable temperatures where the combined cooling units keep the card.

As you might expect, it recommends its own MSI afterburner software for the task though, of course, other overclocking programs are available.

Although MSI has yet to announce pricing options for the Sea Hawk graphics card, we do have a good idea what it will end up at, since Corsair has jumped the gun and put the card up for preorder on its own store. Curiously though, it refers to the card as a “Hydro GFX” version of the 980 Ti, rather than the MSI chosen moniker (via TechReport).

Either way though, Corsair’s version is priced at $740, so we would expect MSI to attach a similar price tag to its version when it’s eventually available.

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