News EVGA announces GeForce GTX 980 Hybrid

That's nice, but the 980, like the 970, is power-limited rather than temperature-limited in most situations. You'll run into the BIOS hard power limit before it starts overtemperature throttling the clock sped.
It'll run cooler than a regular card, I guess, and maybe a bit quieter. Probably not much quieter though, that little blower still needs to cool the VRMs, which are likely not covered by the AIO they have tucked under the shroud.

 

Knowing EVGA, I don't think they'd let a problem like that slide. They probably have direct access to modify the BIOS, so I'm sure that's a non-issue. Besides, the limits you speak of are probably limited by the nvidia software in your OS, but these limits probably don't exist in the BIOS. I may be wrong about that, since I don't own any 900 series GPUs.

For me personally, overclocking GPUs via BIOS is the way to go. As long as you know its stable, you don't have to worry about it, and you get to unlock features or higher frequencies that were otherwise blocked off from you.

 

Kind of. Every OEM has access to the BIOs to set whatever max voltages they want. the problem is, Nvidia don't want people blowing up GPU dies and blaming them, so mandate maximum voltages (and thus, maximum power). EVGA can violate these requirements, but that effectively means that any die failures are 100% EVGA's problem in terms of warranty support.

No, the limit is definitely in the BIOS. You can modify the desired voltage, frequency etc in software up to certain limits (i.e. you have the 'soft' limit set in software which you can modify, and the 'hard' limit set in the BIOs that you need to mod and reflash to modify), but those limits are set in the card BIOS. The card simply won't set the voltage beyond the hard limits. This has been the case since Fermi, but has been less of an issue up until Maxwell (2) due to all but extreme cooling setups being temperature limited.

 

What? .. this is only a single GPU. I will still need another in order to run anything higher then 1080 res. Have a 980 and it chokes on on 2560x1440 not bad but it stutters and could barely handle 4K. Was hoping they got smart and added more ram or did a dual GPU setup for a single card configuration.
Do like that they added better cooling.

 

unless you flash custom BIOS that allows it

 

In my opinion, adding more RAM to a single GPU is hardly going to make games perform better on 2K resolutions or higher. It wouldn't surprise me if many people on such screens don't use up all 4GB, with the exception of a few poorly optimized games. I have a small feeling that GPU cores aren't fully stressed out either, but nobody benchmarks GPU utilization so that's just speculation.

The way I see it, you should have 1 GPU for every additional 1K you add if you expect to play a game at full detail (minus anti-aliasing, because that's just stupid if your pixel density is high enough). I'm not implying that each of these GPUs per 1k increments should all be a GTX 980 or a R9 290X, I'm just saying the more important thing is more bandwidth.