Gadgetory

a chooses ROG Strix is the last of the major ten ATT is for us to review and we're introducing brand new charts that normalize noise levels so to speak the strength is another of the three fan design cards supported by two large aluminum fin stacks that are split by six heat pipes the cooler doesn't go as crazy with engineering as EVGA ACX design but as we learn in this review it does just fine with what asus has laid out on the table before that this content is brought to you by custom backplate makers at v1 tech comm v1 Tech builds GP back plates to order with their online customization tool making it easy to theme upcoming PC builds that plates cost $25 and up and are installed via magnets and can be seen in some shots of the cards reviewing that lately used code gamers Nexus 5 for five dollars off your order or click the link below the asus strix ROG card the 1080i right here is one of the last ones we're looking at anytime soon from the 1080i family this is among the highest end 1080p eyes we've looked at alongside the FTW three from EVGA both of those are $780 so they compete directly with each other and they're also both three fan coolers with the exception being really just the expansion slot requirement asus is card is clocked at 1708 megahertz boost when OC mode is used or 1683 megahertz boost when game mode is used but because of how boost 3.0 works that doesn't really mean a whole lot it'll just kind of do whatever it feels like based on thermal and power budget so ultimately what we've learned with all these cards as we've known for a while now with Pascal is that they perform pretty much identically ultimately it's still a gtx 1080i under the hood regardless of what's going on with the PCB in the cooler that means that we really care about thermals and about noise so we've introduced a new chart that sort of normalizes for a 40 DBA output that'll be pretty fun to look at and there will be no gaming results in this one you can check the article below if you really want the hose but they're basically the same as every other 1080 TI that we've reviewed aside from maybe the EFI version where it gets a bit hot because of the cooler design so this one is a tricks card it's got a backplate it's got three pen cooler will go over in a second one final thing to point out before getting to the cooler the GeForce GTX branding on this one is the smallest out of all the ones we've seen so far and there's a reason for that and videos requiring the words GeForce GTX to appear on the 1080p eyes as far as we know for this round of cards and Asus has dealt with that in a clever way they put a sticker on it that says 1080i you can peel it off if you want to so we're chatting that out I guess because they're the only ones who figured it out they you too strict cooler is fairly straightforward the base plate covers only key areas like the vram with the right half of the cooler taking care of the vrm components directly base plate is secured by several screws on the top side of the PCB rather than using screws only in the back half of the card like most vendors do six total heat pipes are in the cooler each six millimeters in diameter and route through both halves of the heat sink straight fins are used in the heatsink with no fancy l-shaped fins like in my eye CX design and those fins make contact me if they're all bad to the core component town misconception is that this doesn't provide enough surface area for contact but we've proven before that given a straight fin contact is a significant improvement over no contact as for the PCB Asus uses the same voltage controller as Nvidia's founders Edition cars is driving a double v phase BRM for an effective 10 videos design using international rectifier 3 5 v 60 amp power stages and for other small notes on the board it's got two fan headers on the far right side along with an RGB header naturally I will allow you to sync with other RGB ACS type devices so diving straight into this one the testing methodology as always will be linked in the description below we define how we use or how we obtain measurements of the power components of the vram components because this doesn't have sensors like the IC X cards do so we do it with our own hardware our own measurement devices that's all down there Gaming results will be in the article overclocking although unexcited across all these cards so far will also be in the article but really just I want to drive home the focus is on thermals and no waise once you get to this level of card there's not a whole lot of difference in gaming we're talking a couple percentage points and a lot of the time even that is kind of mixed we can't really confidently state ones better than the other unless it's a large enough gap because the difference in just chip to chip quality from the fact from Nvidia directly to these board partners is enough where I could test 10 of these cards and they would have a spread of a couple of percent so not really too much exciting in the gaming Department they all perform like a 1080p high is the basics of it our first chart is a simple one we're plotting temperature and frequency under a power virus scenario here which helps better understand thermal performance fan performance and frequency performance under vrm torture scenario this means that we're also not maximizing the clock so it's been enumerated in a different way and gaming scenarios you get a higher clock with lower power draw as the GPU approaches 55 to 60 Celsius the stock profile dictates that the fan kicks in at that point and starts ramping up to match temperature GPU frequency fluctuates more heavily with this card done with the FT w3 and we can kind of slide that chart onto the screen as well we saw a frequency range of approximately 62 mega Hertz on the FT w3 and range about 152 mega Hertz on the Strix range meaning the actual definition as in top to bottom range of fluctuation some of this can be credited to chip to chip manufacturing tolerances and variants you don't have a large enough sample size of these Strix to be sure but both FTW three is performed the same way regardless the cards temperature target seems to be 65 Celsius at which point the fans are spending at 1,400 rpm on our bench well I get fixed noise temperature performance in a bit moving on our next chart shows individual component temperatures just for the 1080i Strix card when under Auto cooling conditions we measure the power components around the center of the vrm as that's the hottest location the MOSFET temperature readings spits out at around 68 to 69 Celsius which is well within any reasonable mosfet spec most pets can take 125 C and beyond so this one's really no problem at all so far we're cooler than the gigabyte extreme power components vram is a somewhat warm on the asus strix comparatively but still well within spec looking at 85 to 87 Salty's for the hottest fear and module sandwiched between the GPU and the capacitor bank for the BRM let's move on to some comparative benchmarks this first chart shows GPU diode and the power component temperatures with Auto settings we'll look at fixed 40 DB a test next the ACS 1080i ROG Strix card targets of 65 Celsius GP diode temperature putting it nearly equal with the EVGA FTW 366 Celsius targets and cooler than the SC 2 cooler than the gigabyte extreme by a considerable 7 C and cooler than the gaming X by a few degrees as well we can have power component temperatures the EVGA FTW 3 still reigns can in this department entirely thanks with overbuilt heatsink CRM and asynchronous fans with asus landing in middle of the pack the only real takeaway here is that gigabytes card is the least impressive when looking at out of box thermals and the cooler happens to be the biggest so here's the new 40 DB a test coming up in a moment quick disclaimer though a lot of people requested this thank you for the suggestion it was a great idea there are some challenges with this testing though which is why it takes a while to implement one of those is specific to EVGA because the other board partners aren't doing this asynchronous fan thing yet at least not in any serious capacity so we have to figure out with Eva J's cards how do we achieve 40 decibels of output because we can control all three fans the card will sort of auto control to a point of offsetting the power and the memory fans by maybe 1 to 200 rpm meaning that they are 1 to 200 rpm different from the GPU fan rpm we ended up sticking with that sort of proportion where we offset the GPU power and memory fans by an equivalent amount to what EVGA was doing stock out of the box that doesn't mean it's the best configuration though EVGA is out of box config is pretty aggressive it's a bit louder when it's left alone and it doesn't need to be so you could really play around with the same for a long time and find the exact perfect mixture of fan speed on all three fans to get 40 DBA and good cooling it's not that easy to do unfortunately so keep that in mind EVGA is performance will depend very heavily on how you configure the three fans I think we did what we did we did a 54% on the GPU and 40 on the power in the memory but if you go up more on the memory lower on the power meet in the middle on the GPU then you might end up with better performance than we're seeing in terms of temperatures just there's a whole lot of stuff to play with but the other cards are pretty easy find the decibel output set the fans of that percentage and let it go gigabytes still being added to this one we only have the GPU temperatures right now but the other three have all been run through with fan speeds configured to a fixed 40 DBA output we finally start to see some distinction between these a IV partner cards we configured EVGA again to run at 54 40 and 40 percent for the three fan speeds as GPM in order the other cards are all or nothing for their fan speeds making them easier asus is impressive here rog Strix runs cooler on the GPU producing a 31.4 selfies delta T over ambient value which means we've adjusted it for ambient and that's a full 6 LT is cooler than the next closest card to the gaming X which has generally been one of the quietest cards on our bench that card has now been dethroned by asus and next the gigabyte extreme horas which doesn't look all that great when tested at stock speeds is running 40.7 salvias delta T with the FTW three last but again the most difficult to configure so you can get these temperatures lower and sacrifice other component temperatures if so desired just a matter of how many hours you want to put into it power temperature isn't measured on the middle MOSFET off set up from the middle and the Strix again at the lead with a 35.4 Celsius Delta team measurement EVGA FTW three is the number one coolest for VR on components when all cards are configured Auto but loses ground to aces here when we configured a 40 DBA output that's a 40.4 sells these delta T value with Amazigh trailing at 40 2.1 celsius delta t finally the vram module between the GPU and the vrm which tends to be the hottest measures at fifty two point seven sells is delta T on the Strix card where EVGA runs 50 6.6 temperature on the vram module trailed by msi at 57.9 Celsius with these noise equalized tests ACS is the clear winner here they have best temperatures all around the board the only MSI we know where they're performing pretty easy to test gigabyte we know their GP temperature need to run the fat's in the VM EVGA is hard because again any one of those three temperatures you could bring way down at the cost of pushing some of the other ones up a little bit so just depends on how much you're willing to trade power could go up GPU can go down and vice versa but that's a start to our new charts it's pretty cool stuff I'm excited to add more to it these are the kind of charts that really only work when we have a whole bunch of one type of GPU like GP 102 or what-have-you because of the kind of chart it is I mean ultimately you're comparing cooler is not GPUs we might try and play around with it for other things but this was the debut so let us know what you think let's look at our older noise chart under idle conditions the strict makes no noise and we see our noise floor of the test environment the strict cards fans spin down one under no-load as do the fans of the SCT FTW 3s by OS 2 game and X and extreme horas one left to their own devices Auto the Strix is the second quietest card with the gaming X holding on to the quietest rank as it has done the entire time of well actually all of our recent ZP is has the Strix pushes about 38.6 DBA went under auto fan curves it so it's spinning slower than in the aforementioned at 40 DB a test to this plant at roughly tied with the extreme horas and perceptibly quieter than the FTW three-card with Auto fan speeds so you carry the EVGA though the FTW three is a dual slot card not many others can say that at this time at 50% fan speeds at 1080 I extreme and gaming X cards are roughly tied as are these Trix FTW 3 and F ecards of the gap between all three of the ladder are noticeably louder than the extreme and gaming X that c2 is more than 2 times louder than the gaming X and perceived noise output as this is a logarithmic scale this number isn't all that useful though since you're either running cool is under Auto conditions or under fixed fan curves which are new for DBA test sort of accounts for we also have a chart with noise at 100% just a pride perspective your fans will never realistically reach a 100% fan speed as the cards would rather sacrifice frequency then push decibel levels as high that's true for all of these at 100% speed zone on the less the strakes is among the as three cards on the bench including sc2 and heightened XP all this really means that Asus allows its fans to go faster than others that combined with acoustics of the cooling solution let's flashback to that auto test for noise if you're using the card out of box with no changes whatsoever this is the test that you should pay attention to and the acoustics you should expect it has one of the most efficient coolers we tested thus far showing by thermal performance overall and by the 40 DB a normalized charts but it does have quite a bit of competition particularly from MSI and the gaming X which is a tall cooler with big fans again like the FT w3 it's hard to justify a 780 dollar purchase for one of these types of cards if it doesn't offer anything you care about and ultimately gaming performance for all of them pretty much the same so if that's all you care about as long as it's not a thermally limited card like an Effie card or similar design then you can really buy any of the ones we've reviewed so far when it comes to thermal the noise that's where there's distinction between the devices so not too much to be fair they're all fairly close when Auto once we start controlling for 40 DBA this one's looking pretty damn good but it's also again $780 and you could tune the FTW three to your heart's content if you wanted to spend all day on it it's got all those sensors on it it's definitely an enthusiast toy also 782 colours so we look to the won the $50 bracket 750 points and the SC to the gaming acts the extremists are all around that point the extreme Horace as we review more of these cards looks like the less favorable purchase to be nice to it the gaming acts and the sc2 however are much more competitive directly with each other and with the other devices there's 750 otters on 780 and they will make the majority of users perfectly happy as would to be fair at 720 dollar version of the 1080i once you get the 700 you have to be careful what you buy there is some pretty bad card to that price point we might have content on them I'm not really sure the FE card has a great PCB but it's not beat cooler so unless you're going to mod it it's really not ideal for their own performance which restricts your frequency performance restricts your frame rate something like 6 to 11 send the pan down the game so really what you're looking at from our tests is if you do not care specifically about something this offers by a $750 card 720 to 750 and call it a day and be happy with it if you like the noise performance we're seeing out of this particularly at the 40 DB a point it's a pretty damn competitive by the FT w3 is less easy to justify at this point than it was even before and the sc2 still is a strong contender at $750 and as one of our co2 is just because it's got all those icx sensors on it which frankly are a lot of fun to play with even though they might not provide a whole lot of functional value to you so it's kind of a neat thing to look at which I spending that much money that's half the battle anyway so that's the Strix it's a good card just again 30 bucks more do you want to spend it not everyone needs to most people in fact don't need to so it keep that in mind thank you for watching as always you can go to patreon.com/scishow to be like to get a preview of the new types of charts I posted the teaser of this one before we went live with the review and you can go to store that gamers Nexus about not to grab shirts we have some try blends that are almost out of stock thanks to all of you reviews that gaming sexist on net I'll see you all next time