Gadgetory

in step with our best of comput X carriage we're moving from cases two video cards this year has been a huge milestone year for all of the silicon manufacturers with NVIDIA introducing Pascal and the introducing Polaris and Intel moving to broad well II and KB lake later this year today we're focusing on the GTX 1080 AIB cards though before that this coverage is brought to you by enermax and their new lick max giant open loop liquid cooler with RGB LED support Polaris 10 and the RX 480 didn't reveal in time for AI be partners to debut cards at computex and the gtx 1070 aib models were only presented by EVGA for some reason so for this roundup we're sticking to the 1080 models but there's plenty to work with here anyway and there's no particular order to this list short of a kingpin model EVGA is most impressive feat of engineering and the current generation is its GTX 1080 classified which runs a 14 plus three phase power design and is fitted with a monstrous heatsink the card is able to bypass v bios limitations by connecting to EV bot and that's an external hardware utility if you're not aware theoretically this will allow a higher overclock to be pushed with the extra over voltage to stabilize the clock rate the reason for the use of the word theoretically is because there may yet be other limitations within the nvidia v bios or drivers or something like that but we're still exploring those issues the classified card is TBD on its price as is the new version of the hybrid and we built our own GTX 1080 hybrid previously pretty recently but EVGA S has got a cleaner more official look and versioning to it EVGA told us that they saw very similar cooling performance to what we tested in our labs on our own hacked together hybrid and that plants the hybrid version of the 1080 at around 18 celsius delta t / ambient that's a massive performance improvement that reduces voltage and power leakage and improves overall clock stability and just generally being a cooler GPU where most interested though in the hybrid and the FTW versions of the card just because the tremendously effective cooling solution on the hybrid EVGA uses an asa tech block that has extruded copper cold plate something which benefits the GPU greatly when compared to something like the Seahawk which is a card that has the age 55 CPU clcs from corsair and the hybrid runs a 10+2 phase of vrm and uses the same board design as the FTW card so it is effectively an FTW hybrid both of these have extra power headers as does the classified and only the EVGA SC lacks custom designs and is effectively a reference 1080 but with the AC x3 point 0 cooler for six hundred and fifty dollars we tried live overclocking MSI's twin frozr Z card at their computex sweet but ended up limited by SLI complexities and just being on a show floor still the new twin frozr cards have moved to an updated square heat pipe design for greater surface area and points of contact on the heatsink and they also use a new dispersion blade fan design so that uses an inter mixed assortment of dispersion blades and traditional fan blades to help push and pull air as necessary through the aluminum heatsink these are mounted to the faceplate of course which is atop the heat sink and the heatsink has five to six heat pipes within it and these are the new square design msi has updated its GPU line as well with the Z video cards at the high end the X in the middle and gaming cards at the bottom and that's their new stack the GTX 1080 Z ships with the highest clock and a 10 plus 1 phase of erm the memory phasing does seem a bit odd maybe should be 10 plus 2 or something like that but the gaming series will run a more simplified vrm we're not sure on the exact specifications of that just yet we do know however the MSI's cards will reach all the way down to the six hundred dollar MSRP that Nvidia posted during its initial announcement of the 1080 there is no lightning as of yet you may have seen the black and yellow beast and some of our footage up to now or in previous videos and the one of the show the one that you've seen is sadly only at 980 TI lightning there is no 1080 lighting just yet gigabyte is one of the biggest competitors in the market we recently toured their smt line and taiwan to see how video cards and mother our maid revealing a pretty high volume operation the g1 gaming is gigabyte smart entry level video card price at six hundred fifty dollars and outfitted with a simpler heatsink then its larger brother the g1 gaming and extreme gaming cards are both limited on information right now with the vrm phasing and over voltage specs presently undefined at least by the representatives at the booth and sweet and the extreme gaming card uses a stack to fan cooler so this is something new for gigabyte basically it's two sets of fan blades stacked centrally with flanking normal fans on either side it's a weird setup and we're not really sure how the turbulence and noise are or how it will cool but it should be interesting test once we get one in our labs the extreme gaming card should be about 670 to six hundred eighty dollars and the g1 gaming will be about 650 we discovered asus strix on the show floor at computex hidden away in an XG station to external GPU enclosure the Strix mostly focuses on advertising asus is low noise cooler and hosts some more toned down a plus to vrm phasing design it's not going as hard on the overclocking subtext as some of its competitors which should help with the price positioning the GTX 1080 Strix is making the most noise with its or RGB LEDs and I say noise I mean marketing not actual noise and that does seem to be a big thing these days even though I haven't mentioned it gigabyte also had RGB LEDs EVGA also had RGB LEDs and ms high had RGB LEDs so this is really something that pretty much everyone's got at this point besides that it's just more TBD on some of the ACS products in the near future now speaking very briefly of again msi they partnered with corsair and so there's two video cards with different names but it's it's the same device it is the exact same card and that is the Seahawk from msi or the hydrographics if buying from Corsairs webstore same device it's a liquid-cooled GTX 1080 and it's using in h55 CPU a closed-loop liquid cooler mounted to the GPU block and reviewed the original Seahawk in mine a TTI form if you're curious how that performed now there were other cards and vendors at computex but these are the ones that we have the most hands-on time with there's GALEX and zotac and plenty of other folks who had interesting cars will hopefully be talking about those more in the near future but for now this is what we've got and just one thing closing out here I'm not quite sure how well the ultra high-end cards will perform just yet sort of like the classified and extreme gaming devices we're unsure of where they will be landing in the performance stack because of limitations and v bios and elsewhere and depending on if these vendors will bypass those limitations it remains to be seen if there's sort of asymptotic frame rate performance or overclocked performance and this is something that we're investigating actively and we'll keep you all updated on that's all for this recap subscribe to see the rest of our computex coverage as always patreon link the postal video to helps out directly thanks for watching I'll see you all next time