Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today I'm taking a look at a brand new video card from the folks over at EB GA this is their gtx 1080 for the win 2 featuring their brand new icx technology and that entails a bunch of different things including a new PCB and updated software with precision XOC as well as some tweaks and changes to the cooler itself over the a CX 3.0 model were already familiar with with the 10 series cards from Nvidia so we're taking a look at all that today I also want to preface this video by saying 2016 was kind of an interesting year for EVGA they started off really strong with the 10 series launched with the HDX coolers but then there was that incident that overheating issue with the V RMS on their GTX 970 s and 10 80s due to a thermal pad not being implemented on those cards so I feel like this is in some small way at least a small way is a response to that debacle if you will and we're gonna be taking a look to see if if this really is a step-up pun intended from the from the existing a CX cars now icx isin technology is going to cover not just the 1080 for the win but also GTX 10 60s and 10 seventies with the base super clock and for the wind variance you will be paying a small premium however this is a $30 price hike on this card actually on this particular model over its a CX equivalent and whether or not it's worth that those extra 30 bucks we will find out by the end of this video so on that note sit back relax some of the correctives box open and we'll take a closer look at the card so here's a close-up look at the card itself and you know cosmetically speaking it looks pretty much the same as the a CX there's not too much to say in the aesthetic Department however there are our couple changes one being the the back bike here you see there's a bunch of ventilation cutouts now so that just allows hot air to more easily escape off the PCB which is nice and EVGA is also sort of re-engineered the back plate and the base plate for that matter to function more like a heatsink because it's now making direct contact with some of the components underneath and that's supposed to of course aid in thermals and whatnot actually if you look at the base plate there are these little pin fins that are sticking out they're interlaced pin fins that just add a little bit more surface area to this now base plate / heat sink and of course that adds to the thermal dissipation of the whole systems that's kind of nice additionally we've got some new status LED indicators that would light up right here there's three of them you can't see them on the cards off you have to wait right the card to be all powered up and operational but these essentially give you an at-a-glance look at your temperature for various components on the card including your GPU your vrm and your memory and basically you can jump into the xoc software and assign any color to any temperature threshold to your heart's content and that way you let's say sorry the garage doors opening if you hear that let's say your GPU status LED indicator remains green when you're under 40 degrees Celsius and then it turns blue between 40 and 60 and then it turns red anything past that you can pretty much do however you like it just gives you a really nice easy way to look at that when you're gaming or whatever now of course if your system is like under your desk or you just don't have a case where you can see this part of your graphics card at all times then they've also allowed you to throw up this information on the OSD with with the via XOC and that way you can see it on your screen whenever you're gaming and things like that now of course you might be wondering well how are they measuring how are they measuring vrm and your memory well I'm glad you asked there's actually that's probably the biggest change to this card from an engineering standpoint are is the the two MCS or micro control units that have been built in and that allows you to monitor the new nine sensors that are now on this board that are scattered about various components including one on your GPU you get five on your power area and you get three for your memory and of course you can't forget the one additional sensor on the GPU just based on from Nvidia themselves but essentially you get ten sensors now that you can monitor within the software and now that you have all this new data coming in EVGA is also given us a way to kind of handle and respond to that with their new fan design so these are actually the same fans they're still the same size same blade design and same bearings from what I can tell however they're now a synchronous meaning that instead of just having one fan header on the PCB that is kind of like split into two fans and sharing that same header each of each fan now has its own dedicated fan header there fan headers on this PCB which means you can now set individual fan curves per fans so this one would basically handle your GPU temperatures into the fan curve with your GPU is getting too hot this one will ramp up and this one can stay perfectly still if your memory and VRM are completely in check thermally speaking or you can have it the opposite let's say you're doing a more memory intensive task that doesn't tax be GPU itself very much then you can have this one roll at a low rpm have this one speed up a bit and the faster fan will kind of cancel out the noise of the other essentially lowering the overall acoustic profile which i think is pretty cool I haven't seen this on a video card before so we'll see if we can mess around with that later and finally before we switch it over to a look at our test bed I want to quickly point out the new Finn design here so there's actually these little tiny holes now on each of the fins kind of looks like Swiss cheese in your video card but essentially with those with those holes they allow the air that's being pushed down from the fans to more evenly scatter and spread across the entire fin stack and of course of condition more heat and so forth there's big focus on heat dissipation with this new lineup of cards so hopefully that actually does make a difference so here's a quick look at our testing hardware and of course we're gonna be testing two of these EVGA GTX 1080s against each other today one of which is the a CX 3.0 for the wind the other being the eye CX for the win 2 which is the card that's clearly on display at the moment on our motherboard you can tell because one of the fans is spinning while the others is not taken advantage of that asynchronous technologies and I really did kind of want to test out both of those independent fan curves for the first time but I was unable to do so because it's just not working properly in the software anytime I try to apply one fan curve to one fan it overrides the curve for the other so unfortunately until EVGA gets back to me with buy some kind of software update or they rectify or patch the issue I'm pretty much stuck to testing this at fixed fan speeds for now between both cards which actually I don't mind it all because it probably reduces the amount of variants especially when we're talking about thermal testing so I did fix both of the fans both cards fan speeds at 20 around 2002 2050 rpm so we're going to be getting very consistent repeatable results there hopefully and additionally we've got a bunch of other hardware to talk about here we've got a 59 60 x8 core from Intel this is their ice gscp you i've overclocked it 240 500 megahertz with the help of a corsair h 100 IG t --xv to 240 millimeter liquid a io we've also got the the asus motherboard here's of the Strix x99 gaming it's a beast of a board along with 32 gigs of course here I'm sorry g.skill tried NZ ddr4 of course at 3 200 megahertz so our storage goes we've got a one terabyte crucial MX 200 with everything loaded up onto it it's not full at all so that shouldn't be an issue in terms of performance slowdowns and we've also got a gaming extreme 1200 watt power supply from gigabyte so we've got plenty of power going to all these components here I think on that note we can go ahead and take a look at our data so here we have the results and aren't they beautiful yes indeed so you can see here I've got them split up into two halves so we've got the AC X numbers on the left and the new IC x results on the right side just so you guys don't get it twisted I'm going to be going back and forth like this for a bit so if you get nauseous easily I want to pop a Dramamine or something we've also got oh I want to mention ambient temperatures were kept at a constant 25 C in my room thanks to this little guy shout out to the window AC unit you ballin yo and everything else was pretty consistent fan speed again twenty-two thousand two two thousand and fifty rpm on both of the on both of the cards and these are just screenshots of course you can see here we left everything as is in terms of the core clock offset memory clock offset and our power and temperature targets are all pretty much consistent from A to B so we have a nice apples to apples comparison on that we're going at a temperature here for our AC X card 69 degrees C on the core was the max that it hit whereas on the IC X but for our 71 mmm what's up with that we actually went up two degrees on the allegedly cooler card which of course two degrees Celsius in gaming is not going to affect your performance at all you're not going to notice like oh I can really tell this is two degrees warmer than it was five minutes ago no that's that's not that's not what this is about however for a car that is marketed as being thermally superior than its predecessor I'm pretty sure that this was not EVGA intent to make a slightly warmer card even though it may not affect your gaming experience I don't know if I mentioned this but both cards are also same between a CS and IC x2 core clock frequencies and memory clock frequencies are exactly the same out-of-the-box this did spike up a little bit higher 1974 to 1961 on the AC X however those could be outliers are just maximum values if you look over here with gpu-z you can see that they're clearly clocked so here's 1721 megahertz core and 1860 boost same exact deal over here with the AC X 1721 and 1860 so if performance is really not where it's at if there's no difference in performance between the two cards and at least in this test since the fans are a fixed rpms that acoustics are really not any different either so I didn't even bother doing an acoustics test because they're spinning at the same speed then really thermals are the only things that that could be improved here which they are not last thing I want to point out here is power consumption so on the AC X card eighty six point eight percent TDP whereas we actually went up a bit to ninety three point four percent on the IC X card now why could that be I have a couple speculations but I don't know if they're true that's why they're speculations the first one is that there are new MOSFETs that are embedded or implemented onto the IC x card so maybe the new MOSFETs have something to do with how they're handling the power and then also the other thing was how the fans are designed now that there's two individual or two dedicated fan headers instead of one being split perhaps that has something to do with the power and the the TDP things like that I don't know and I don't really have the tools to test it all out either so that also reminds me there's probably some other great tech tubers out there that also have gone live with a video this morning on this card so go ahead and check it out I'll put links in the description below all Hardware J's $0.02 gamers Nexus of course subscribe to those guys they're awesome and check out what what their findings were because this is by no means this is just one test that I ran guys granted I ran it multiple times and there was my results were consistent and repeatable however you never know so go ahead and cross-reference those guys and show them some love Tala map sent you on that note so let me go ahead and close this video out with some final words so my overall takeaway from EVGA is new icx technology is that it's a huge step in the right direction I think all the thought and engineering that's been poured into it they're all really good ideas and good concepts are going to drive the industry forward as a whole I think for a long time we as gamers have been looking at GPU temperatures primarily and overlooking the fact that there are a bunch of other factors involved such as memory or vrm which can also overheat just as easily as your GPU if not monitored properly and now that EVGA is made an easy way for us to do that we can then respond accordingly with with you know putting the proper cooling strategies into place or messing with a fan curves for example unfortunately that's one of the reasons why I can't get a super hard conclusion on this card right now is because the software wasn't quite ready so maybe once the software gets patched let me know if you'd want to see an update to this video because I think the fact that we're able to control them independently could really add a ton of value to this card I know it doesn't it's getting a little bit warmer two degrees warmer than what we saw in the AC X 3.0 today but I think that's only part of the story because of course we haven't tested out one of the other main features which is those fan curves so let me know if you guys are on board with this card or if you have any other opinions but until next time guys thank you so much for watching toss me a like on the video if you enjoyed it and I'll see you all in the next one