Gadgetory

all right so we are back with the results this is part three of our series of creating an RX 480 hybrid this thing I would say I reasonably liked the look of the 1080 hybrid when we made it this thing looks legitimately somewhat like a monster but it worked pretty well and that's what we're here to talk about so first of all this coverage is brought to you by Origin PC and their new origin Kronos which is customizable upgradable and ships with the R X 480 video card in that card is the one we're talking out here but we've changed it quite a bit so this is part of the original card this is part of some garbage this is part of the original card and and then this is the faceplate we took all this off quite obviously and built the hybrid version using an Arctic Exelero hybrid 3 which said I just bought a bunch of these and I hope they would work and that one did work thankfully so what we've got here in terms of the final bill just very quick catching you up there's big mass on the table that's because we were doing all kinds of stuff like adding these individual aluminum vrm heat sinks we added vram heat sinks and these are these are pretty cheap I one of you commented and pointed me to some really good vrm or a VRAM heat spreaders that we'll use next time but these did okay for the job that they had and then we've got this pivotable fan that's just positioned over the vrm and that dissipates heat out of all these these alloys sinks that are in there and those are positioned on the MOSFETs chokes are under there they're obscured they're not cool they don't need to be the GPU is cooled by this liquid pump this is an ASA tech pump it's slightly different from the EVGA hybrid that we have in the cold plate only but this still uses a flat contact cold plate which is what you want for GPUs because GPU the the silicon is just basically perfectly flat as opposed to a cpu see I'll see like 855 which is on the Seahawk where you'll see reasonably worse performance actually significantly worse is on with 2x different than than the hybrid but still good better than the but you see that they're ones because it's using a cpu CLC and those aren't built for it for GPUs and hotspots or different things like that so we built this I've made some changes to this between the second video in this one one of those we position the additional 120 millimeter fan up here and clamped it to the expansion slot blow air down and keeps the the VRM cooler and then I also after some initial testing I changed this fan which is this one from being plugged into the video card directly to being plugged into the power supply and that's to improve stability it gives us a few extra watts for overclocking and the detection wasn't working anyway so the sensor thought that the fan was spinning at 5 million rpm it would go between two thousand and five million so obviously the sensor was wrong the vrm fan was not really adjusting at speeds as necessary so I just put it on max blast and let it go so that's that's what we got for the build and now we're just gonna fly through the results somewhat quickly in view more information in the original rx 40 review if you want the full analysis of how things work and why they work the way they do but we're just gonna go over thermals and stuff like that here alright so let's start with the thermal differences we measure these numbers in delta T over ambient and that means you should add in your own ambient temperature to get the absolute temperature value for your environment but we subtract our ambient so you can do that so with the hybrid three cooler we've got it's running on out of box settings for the 480 just with a better cooler we're able to hit a massively improved twenty 3.0 to Celsius Delta T value for the load temperatures the stock cooler performed at fifty 6.33 Celsius so that's an eighty three point nine percent difference that's not as huge as our 102 percent difference on the GTX 1080 hybrid but that's for a few reasons one the founders edition cooler and the GP 104 chip runs a little bit hotter the founders edition cooler is better built than this one but the chip is hotter and larger so that's one reason we see that and then to the EVGA hybrid solution does use that extrusion on the copper the cold plate which also produces some of the difference we see this hybrid three solution keeps the am the Rx for 80 thermals within 40 to 50 Celsius if you're looking at the absolute value when running the stock clock rather than the 80 to 85 Celsius area of the original cooler absolute values just for sake of visualizing the data differently here's a look at the thermals overtime chart this first chart is a little complex and includes several video cards but you can clearly see where the two hybrid experiments beat out the competition and if we simplify that chart you can see this version contains only 10 80 1070 fe cards are X 480 stock and the hybrid versions of those cards the low idle temperature of the our X 480 hybrid is a mix of the new 14 nanometer FinFET process power reduction methods by AMD to reduce idle consumption and then the rear-mounted heatsink that Arctic cooling includes with it's cooler and also the two fans we use so this one and the one mounted above it do help keep idle temperatures down since they're blowing directly on the card and this is that VRAM backplate heatsink we've got testing a liquid cooled card means that there's one big note and that's that we should test based on thermals more than just raw fan speed percentage because we've hacked this fan together and we're no longer using the onboard vrm fan controller and we're running at such low temperatures that you can actually reduce your noise by lowering the fan RPMs on this hybrid card and that in exchange slightly increases your thermals but lowers your DVI output so we'd still be well under the stock reference cooler in terms of noise and thermals by doing that so manually running these fans at their lowest possible speeds produces the temperatures that will show on the screen now and that is what allows us to drop the noise levels were still underneath the original cooler thermals and that's because this thing is really not that good of a cooler and as part of why we were hitting the 80 plus range absolute values so that's that's how you have to look at this if you're actually going to build a hybrid card whether it's this or something else the the main thing to look at is would I rather have really crazy low temperatures with a noise level that's about the same as a normal card sort of sort of before pushing to higher fan RPMs or would I rather increase my temperature slightly still keep it below the original card but have lower noise levels so overclocking is another big thing with the liquid cooled cards I was hoping to get a couple extra megahertz at least out of this thing and I even changed around the fan plugged into the board versus plugged into the motherboard to see if an extra few watts would really help and it didn't so what we ended up with was the overclock stepping table that's on the screen now previously we got stuck at 13 40 megahertz core and 2200 megahertz memory and I was forced to run the fan at around 4000 rpm which just kept it at 89 Celsius and with the giana hybrid solution we ended up at 13 90 megahertz and stuck with the same at 2200 megahertz memory clock I tried pushing the core up to 1400 megahertz and it did survive the initial 5 minute run but it failed right around the 5 minute mark so no way did it survive any kind of endurance this is when unplug the vrm fan from the card and hope to get some more stability amped up the RPM of all the fans in the system to improve cooling even of the vrm but there is no luck we cannot unfortunately claim well we can claim to have hit 1400 megahertz it was there for 5 minutes but it's not realistically possible with this particular card that's not to say you can't do it but we couldn't do it on this card now one thing you can hit and exceed 14 hundred megahertz when testing with synthetic applications like fir marker combustor and that's something we've shown in the past but just because we're hitting those higher frequencies in these synthetic applications I don't count those numbers as valid because it doesn't survive a real game like The Witcher 3 or Grand Theft Auto or shadow of Mordor games which will stress the GPU in different ways multiple different ways so you have this boosting and all this other stuff if it doesn't survive real gaming then we don't claim that it worked so we were at 13 90 megahertz as a 50 megahertz boost over the original core overclock that was at 13 40 megahertz and our memory we could not increase past the 2200 mark so it got stuck at 2200 cannot go to 2250 and maude just for sort of reference did see the voltage peaking pretty high I was hitting 1.15 volts on this thing which is very high for a GPU and that was as opposed to the 1.125 and maximally 1.13 volts that we were seeing previously so it did actually push a little bit higher now in terms of power drop according to gpu-z the board power total was 192 dot 2 watts and that is a good bit increased over the 170 180 watt range we've seen on the 13 40 megahertz overclock I'm not 100% sure what's going on with the power draw of this card yet I'm sure many of you have seen the discussion online we're researching that talked about that more later all right so what's the frame rate impact from this extra 50 mega Hertz and there's really not much of one in GTA 5 we're still seeing bad stuttering issues that we discovered in these 16 not 6.2 pressed drivers for the RX 480 but the FPS is overall marginally improved we're now at ninety one point five instead of eighty nine point five FPS for 1080 ultra over four passes and that's a gain of two point two three percent it's not a linear game though because our original OC had us at a seven point two six percent FPS gain from the stock clock the same non linear gain is mapped across shadow of mordor where we saw a performance jump of three point seven percent versus the stock to 13 40 megahertz jump of seven point nine percent and that's mostly because when I overclocked this I used watt man and I forced the frequency to run exactly the same at all states of operation so we eliminated boosting that means that in these games when when going from something like the stock 1266 boost to thirteen forty it's more than just a 74 megahertz jump because it's not just 1266 the baseline actually goes much lower than that when the card sort of D clocks itself for various circumstances so that's why we see those big gains in our original overclock and mirrors edge also had some nonlinear gains as you can see on the screen now we had a fall from 10% performance improvements to much less than that so as far as the hybrid project for the rx 40 the kind of takeaways here and do a part four of this four more that we've learned takeaways here we are power limited right now doesn't seem like we're voltage limit if we have more voltage than we need and that could be a bad thing for long-term use but we are certainly power limited on the six pin header there's not much I can do about that other than waiting for a RBE partner cards and the GP is obviously cooled significantly better this cooler I am exceedingly unimpressed with the card is a $240 card it has a fairly power efficient in theory architecture but that's kind of being debated right now and the reason we see those high thermals on the stock card is because of this thing which is not a good cooler so the AIB partner cards should be much better now one other thing we could have actually left this on even if it involves zip ties but I think we could have left this on completely but I did not want to because I wanted to try out these separate VRAM heat sinks I wanted to get this on there without any issue of running out of screw length or anything like that or just things bumping into each other and clearance issues and I want to try it as is so this arctic cooler the what is the hybrid three that we bought I'm actually a pretty happy with how this went I really enjoyed putting together I'll probably do a full review on this thing in the future which I really wasn't planning to do but I did like working with it if you saw part two it was exceedingly difficult to get the pump and the cold plate and the block attached to the back plate and I had to recruit help for that because it's you need four or five hands to get those screws through but it was a fun project performance gains you get an extra 50 megahertz absolutely not worth it for frame rates and that's pretty much how it always goes with this overclocking totally not were there frame rates definitely worth it for thermals if you feel like doing something like this I do not like the reference cooler and this resolved that issue in terms of noise were marginally better until you start getting into the high-end fan speeds so if you're doing even basic overclocking the noise does reduce significantly because we're going from four thousand five thousand rpm fans beads which are 55 to 60 decibels for toad the noise down to a much more reasonable fan speed and relying on liquid instead to do all the the bulk of the quote so that's the project as always hit the link in the description below for more information subscribe because we're gonna do a lot more of these including a part four of this with what we learned and that will come up shortly but we do have crossfire testing coming out before that probably so as always patreon link post roll video comment below for more discussion thanks for watching I'll see you all next time