Gadgetory

so what did we learn from our GT x1080 GN hybrid project well first of all to recap there's a three-part series it was really fun to do and we want to do more of these in the future so before we get into the details if you have ideas for the next one post them below we'll look at it and see what we can do after we get back from computex and Asia so this three-part series first I took apart the 1080 second I built up the hybrid version of the 1080i ripping the hybrid cooler EVGA ASA tag liquid cooler off of a 980 I hybrid put it on the 1080 third part we tested it and showed performance results and described sort of what the advantage and loss were in different areas of the card so what we learned primarily about the 1080 that's important is one thermals were in fact a throttle point and we're an issue that needed to be result so these thermal issues basically whenever hit 80 to see the car would clock down hard and then jump back up pretty immediately once it hit 81 see again of course then it hits 80 to see again drops down jumps up drops down jumps up repeats this process and so you end up with a chart that's all crazy like that for the frequency which you don't want and that reflects very poorly in the games that we tested with for example in dirt rally you end up with insane judder or artifacting or something and eventually the screen will just go black now here's the thing any folks who tested this card and overclocked it but did not do the endurance test that we did would not have seen that their overclocked what was in fact unstable so this instability only appears in endurance tests from our card we obviously have one sample so sample size a small but from our card the instability only appears when working over a somewhat dragged out period of time like 10 minutes plus and and in this those cases the thermals will throttle the frequency and do it pretty severely so these overclocks you see online depending on what they're doing in their bench depending on their thermal settings maybe they have there been to one hundred percent speed and I'll talk about that in a moment but either way you do end up with some instability if the thermals are a problem now with the fan of the hundred percent speed this is where it's different if you set the vrm to 100% speed yes it does mitigate a lot of these issues so for benchmarking purposes reviewers almost certainly have had their fans one hundred percent I would trust most of them to do that and we certainly did it in our initial tests but as a user that's useless because the noise is about 57 to 60 decibels at one hundred percent that is as loud as conversational speech I'm probably talking about about 65 decibels right now but the that's just it's not tolerable for a normal use case scenario in a room even with headphones on you would be able to hear that down the hall and down the stairs basically so that's not a good scenario you need some better way to cool it we decided liquid made a whole lot of sense if you want to keep this thing running at a high overclock without the voltage throttling or with i should say without the thermal throttling but to that Miss speak that I just did voltage throttling is the next big problem so thermals were a small issue they contributed a little bit and resolving those thermals gave us an extra 100 megahertz or so overclock stable so it was a good overclock it was a good game and it was a worthwhile project for many reasons the second issue I really wish we could have overclocked more but we could not and that is because after looking at it further the V bios or the video card vios is limited in such a way that it's trying of course to protect the user from applying too much voltage this is a thing that Nvidia AMD you have both done in the past and both presently do and so they limit the voltage control in such a fashion that you cannot destroy your own car they were cover ibly so that is the next limitation but it is controlled very strictly and I think there's room for play there but i'm not positive the vrm looks like a 5 plus 1 phase design not particularly powerful for extreme overclocks kind of middle of the road for the next one hundred dollars certainly but that's what we got for the vrm i still think the voltage can be pushed a little higher but it can't be done without hacking v bio somehow or without doing power mods on the card which speaking frankly i have not done i'm not sure not sure how that would work out so that would certainly be another test we could try and sacrifice our card to the video card gods or something the voltage power mods from what I've seen and read and talked to with manufacturers some of the manufacturers have been speaking to us about this and basically said they think it might be possible to get more voltage out of this thing v bios as a limiter but also the vrm if you just for example power modded and added an extra six pen or eight pin header to that card from what manufacturers have told us it looks like the reference board would not handle that and the vrm would blow so i'm going to trust their judgment on that and not do it myself but i would expect the AIB partners to release their own custom boards that are capable of handling that extra power header which would allow more overclocking Headroom if they unlock v bios and i don't know sometimes the AIB partners aren't allowed to do that so it may be a case where folks like us who want to push this harder turn to forums and look for hacks from the more serious overclockers people like kingpin certainly would be doing this almost immediately so that's that's what we learned with the limits first it's thermals for stability after you get past stability from thermals either because you found a ib card and you've got a better cooler or because you put liquid on it you're running a hundred percent vrm fan whatever once you get that past that point the next limit is the voltage control it cannot go that high i think we're capping at 1062 millivolts and maybe i've seen it go up to the one point oh eight or ten eighty millivolts but that was very short-lived and didn't seem to last so that's pretty hard limit there on the voltage and that's with using EVGA precision the sanctioned tool to do the over voltage that's the next limit third limit will of course be the power connectors themselves but that's pretty good ways out i think voltage is the biggest limit we were not hitting a hundred percent TDP or i should say one hundred twenty percent TDP since we increased it by twenty percent through the power percent target in EVGA precision we were not hitting that power draw with the overclock i think with the overclock we were drawing about three i didn't record this officially but between 299 and 31 8 watts for the overclocked version and that was total system load that's not individual video card power draw total system load was 300 ish and then the stock card without liquid without over clock was running about 270 watts and that's in our power draw chart so it increased an extra 30 watts certainly drawing more power that would put us at about 200 to 10 watts there's some more power left in that header because the PCIe slot also provides 75 watts on its own and depending on what kind of power supply and what kind of Hetar you have there might be more power in there to be had some people will say sort of a hard number they'll provide a hard number in comments or on forums for what power headers are capable of providing that is not always true it depends on your power supply on the header on the particular cable for that power supply and of course on what's going on on the video card side where it may be limiting powered intake for its own safety reasons so those are all factors to consider it's not always just a hard limit based on the cable basically eight pen is not always the same power draw it depends on a couple of things the fluctuation is not that great the range is pretty tight so the range for power draw out of an 8-pin from a power supply is certainly limited but it's not fixed to the same value for every single device that's all I'm trying to convey here so that would cap the limits of the 1080 that's what we've learned from our liquid cooling mod thermals certainly an issue not the big issue v bios is the big issue and then you're next if you resolve the bios your next thing to look at would be the actual wattage provided to the card and some of these things like cooling and the wattage provision are coverable under the aib partners that's something they can do with custom PCBs those custom PCBs I can tell you now will not be signed for six hundred dollars at the low end of this MSRP that's not something I've been told by them that's something that I know will be fact at least immediately just because it's expensive to make so I would expect to 650 to 700 dollar price range for something that's reasonably overclockable the founders edition again as I said in the review it is a good card it warm as well I would not buy it I would buy an a IV partner version because the thermals will be better the noise levels will be better and your stability for overclocks with a lower fan speed will be better even if it's not liquid just having to push fans on there I e twin frozr acx wind for source tricks any one of those would probably do a better almost certainly do a better job than the blower fan there are configurations you want a blower fan we're not going to go into those here but it's mostly SLI so that's the whole project if you have ideas for the next project post them in the comments below we will start exploring these multi-part series because they're pretty fun to do and you can all tell me how I need to get an i fix it sponsorship again so thank you for watching patreon like a postural video I'll see you all next time