Gadgetory

I've been gone over the best CPUs cases at some motherboards and soon coolers we're now looking at the best GTX 1080p eyes of the year because this is such an expensive purchase and we looked at quite a few of them we thought we'd round it all up in one video contrary to popular belief the bottle of cooler does actually matter for video cards will be going through thermal and noise data for the 1080p eyes we've tested including MOSFET vram and GPU temperatures always normalize performance at 40 DBA and the PCB and vrm quality as always with these guides you can find links to all the products discussed in the description below along with their original reviews before we get into that this content is brought to you by the thermal take flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a three hundred sixty millimeter radiator plus three 120 fans that are RGB illuminated if then we'll take it ring fans at that this is a 4.5 done a stack pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below with video cards if you're just looking at gaming benchmarks it's pretty easy to basically see all the 1080 is or 1070 S or 5 ATS and come to a conclusion of they're all the same but the thing is once you look beyond the gaming performance and the clock performance basically you get into territory of how granular do you want to be on thermals and on noise how much do you care about noise normalized performance vrm quality things like that so we've got a roundup for you of all the cards we've tested at least the ones that deserve to be included in the roundup and the quick sort of note here gaming performance between these is all the same it's within a couple FPS so the only reason that ever changes is overclocking and overclocking on 1080 Ti is a non Pascal in general is more a function of silicon quality per chip which is nearly random than it is of the PCB or the vrm or anything like that until you get into heavier overclocking where you're doing exotic cooling or maybe you go with liquid and you need the vrm thermal headroom so we'll be focused on the cooler quality PCB and vrm design and clocks are sort of a secondary function of all of those because basically with Pascal the cooler you keep it the better the clock will be so we can just kind of figure that out by looking at the thermal performance which makes it easy the first award is the most important and is assigned for the best overall combination of thermal and noise performance so basically the best overall ten atti sort of ignoring price for the most part across all tested thermal categories that be vram mosfet GPU diode temperatures we found that h2 Strix 10 atti to be the most consistent and impressive and it's their own performance the Strix keeps its core temperature low but also manages to keep vram and vrm thermals equally and proportionally low to the core this can't be said for a lot of the competing coolers all of this comes down to mounting plates for the heatsink and the fact that ACS is actually leveraging the mass of its 2.5 slot fin stack and fin design pitch and density also all permit good air flow through the sink the shroud doesn't trap air inside of the cooler either so these are all good things at $800 it's sort of the limit of what we're willing to spend on a 1080i and is one of the more expensive ones so you really have to care about noise normalized performance keeping the lowest they're almost possible for the lowest noise possible across all components things like that obviously liquid potentially gets better there too the only category where the Strix cooler really loses some ground is that of size but size and cooling to noise performance are largely mutually exclusive at 2.5 slots some users may instead require a 2 slot card to better accommodate build needs for a single card build though this generally isn't a concern we want to give an honorable mention to MSI and the 1080 TI gaming X here it's a little bit cheaper so that helps out the Twin Frozr cooler remains the most effective dual fan solution we've tested this year it's able to leverage its larger fans to spin out lower quieter rpms than some of its competition and the Twin Frozr design isn't the best buy raw numbers but it has an excellent mix of noise to cooling performance and manages this at a lower price than some of the flat-out best coolers like the Strix that price reduction matters and to offer a competitive cooler at a lower price MSI gets an honorable mention even if it's not outright the best we are interested to see how the company improves its dual fan design for 2018 if at all now that it's been three fan designs this next category best for modding I could also be taken to me in most room for improvement the MSI GTX 1080i armor was originally a $700 bottom-of-the-barrel 1080i rivaling the reference card in price and was for good reason we found the stock cooler to be abysmal and its performance thermally was just not good it wasn't good acoustically either we also noted that the cooler was highly similar they're not entirely the same as the coolers that MSI uses on the 1070 armor cards the upshot of this though is that you can get a very cheap and very good PCB and vrm for entry-level 1080i prices the best kept secret of the 1080 T is is that the 1080i armor for all of its faults and there are many actually has the gaming X PCB which is one of the better ones the gaming XP CB is as 16 of the 50 18 s GS hooks up to 8 inductors controlled by 8 driver icees and gives an eight phase-- vrm with four MOSFETs per phase the fairchild dual FET packages contain that both the highside and low-side FETs and there's over built erm outputs just 15 watts of heat under a typical 250 amp load or 40 watts of heat under a 400 amp overclock that's assuming 125 Celsius on the components for 300 kilohertz for the switching frequency if you're hoping to buy a 1080 TI and convert it into a liquid-cooled card something that we tested with this very card this is one of the best options you're discarding the cooler anyway at that point so there's no point in spending on a big one get a cheaper cooler like the one on the armor and a good PCB for the baseline and our testing with a closed-loop liquid cooler the armored PCB became one of the best cards on our thermal charts and that is while retaining one of the better PCBs and one of the lower prices you definitely wouldn't want this thing with its stock cooler but its primes for modding our next category is for best technology which is assigned to the card that made the biggest contribution to the underlying tech in an AI v partner card for 2017 this one goes to the EVGA icx cards responsible for implementing NTC thermistors across the entire pc be improving vrm cooling by increasing baseplate service area and significantly overhauling a/c acts after the great thermal pad incident sixteen video cards don't change much generationally so to see a company move to install thermistors on critical non GPU components is big it may not seem like a big deal to the average user but if you think about it from a testing perspective icx gives us new tools to improve thermal testing accuracy of aftermarket coolers water cooling solutions and blocks and validate our own external case temperature measurements of VRMs with our thermocouples icx has become a tool for benchmarking as it's easy to measure temperatures of components that would usually go unrecognized this also as far as the consumer is concerned this comes at a time when other manufacturers have dropped the ball on vrn thermals like ZOTAC with the AB extreme and it's poor thermal performance when compared to the sheer mass of its own cooler as GPUs continue to reduce power consumption and cards get smaller temperatures of other components outside the GPU core become increasingly relevant this is because you can run at lower fan speed because the core doesn't need as much cooling but now your vrm is going to get a bit warmer icx complements what we do with our own thermocouples well has become an important tool for testing other cooler designs and is one of the biggest technological changes in coolers for this year our next award is for best value thus far other than the armor a lot of these cards have been in these 750 to $800 range you definitely don't need a card that expensive to get the same frame rates and the acoustic or thermal difference isn't universally important to people so we were split between the 1080i SC black and the 1080i Duke from MSI given the current pricing of the market the MSI Duke is winning this card ranges from at 735 to 750 depending on retailer rebates and sales and adds up priced about where the gaming axe used to be before the mining craziness but we have to work with it the SE black used to be closer to 720 but is unfortunately out of stock at that price or boosted to 750 now making the Duke a bit cheaper and for pure value we'd recommend considering the MSI card on the opposite end of the value argument we also wanted to point out the best PCB and vrm and to quote build Zoid the most ridiculous overkill PCB and vrm this isn't something that 99% of users will ever need but if you're going for a heavy overclocking or just like looking at high-end stuff the galaxy GTX 1080i hof video card is among the top tier cards build Zoid of actually hardcore overclocking did an analysis on this card and believes it to be the best PCB of the 1080 is the galaxy all of fame v core vrm is a 16 phase vrm which again the quote build Zoid is ridiculous and absolutely insane my galaxy Hof uses an ir 3595 voltage controller and eight phase mode using a doubling scheme on the 16 phase setup for the card the vrm ends up with 40 watts of heat dissipation at 400 amps or 54 watts at 500 apps both of which are reasonably controllable with targeted and active cooling the dumbest trend award or as we've been calling it the best dumbest trend it goes to gigantic heat sinks and what can only be described as a measuring contest some manufacturers have continued to increase the mass and physical size of their GPU coolers often with minimal gain in thermal performance in some cases being outperformed by two slot coolers even a noise normalize performance not much of a gain what's worse is a lot of the manufacturers are overlooking cooling basics with their massive coolers like physically connecting hot vrm components to the oversized heatsink rather than letting them sit and bake underneath it sort of the entire point of a big cooler really stretching into three slot designs with three pounds of metal doesn't make the cooler automatically good it just means that it's big and often times not at all worth that it cost to buy or manufacture there are a lot of good 2.5 slot designs out there like a messiah's twin frozer and the asus strix coolers and cards like the gigabyte extreme or ZOTAC extreme are larger than each of these yet worse in some of the comparative thermal performance this comes down to smarter design as opposed to just using more metal for the sake of looking bigger and as we go into the next year hopefully the reliance on just loading a card with copper and aluminum to make it look impressive will die down a bit as on card thermistors and things like that become more prevalent because that means testing of non GPU components will become more prevalent and if it doesn't we're still here and we'll still be doing it so in always check with us subscribe for more as always that's the GPU list for 1080 T eyes we have one of these coming or basically all the cards more of an overall roundup of best in each category type of thing so subscribe for that store doc gamers Nexus net to pick up a shirt like this one or one of our stickers and patreon.com slash gamers Nexus that was that directly thank you for watching I'll see you all next time