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Corsair Hydro GFX 1080 Review & Benchmark

2016-08-23
the coarser hydrographics gtx 1080 is the child of a partnership between a Messiaen coarser cost $750 as a bit different from the gtx 1080 hybrid that we were talking about shortly for this card Corsair provides the cooler in 855 cooler with some slight modifications and MSI provides the board and access to Nvidia for the GPU itself and as far as these two cards we'll be comparing them directly in a very soon to come video before we get into the content and the review this content is brought to you by iBUYPOWER and their element gaming PC which comes with the arc LED fans under glow for neon effect on the system and a large tempered glass side window let's get into the content first off we tore down the hydro graphics in another video it's already on the channel the teardown process involves a handful of screws for the back plate that reveals ultimately that this is an MSI low-end card that's been outfitted with a CPU cooler for liquid cooling and the corsair cooler does not use a protrusion for the cold plate like EVGA is does but does appear to be flat rather than curved like most CPU coolers cold plates are they've not really got that slight concave Bend to them that accommodates the IHS and the hotspots on a CPU what you don't want for GPUs because the silicon is flat and no curvature is required the board is a Founders Edition board with a 5 plus 1 phase VRM but a backplate has been added in addition to the liquid cooler Corsair uses a radial blower fan for the cooler solution of course aren't MSI since it is basically a Founders Edition cooler other than the liquid and that's something we'll talk about more in our upcoming EVGA hybrid versus Seahawk / hydrographics coverage for specs it's the same thing as any other gtx 1088 gigabytes of gddr5 xgp 104 - 400 GPU and all of that which comes with the GP 104 400 GPU but the clock is pre overclocked to 1847 megahertz about the same as the MSI GTX 1080 gaming X and that's a reasonable gain over the founders Edition 17 33 megahertz used note that MSI pre applies the overclock mode to this reviewer card but it will ship to consumers in gaming mode and that can be changed with BIOS updates or with the software that comes with the card so for today we're benchmarking the thermals most extensively obviously it's mostly a thermal solution here and we'll be comparing that against our 1080 hybrid that we built different from this one but using the same CPU GPU CLC so you can check that content out previously we'll be comparing those two directly for now this card came in today as we were about to start filming this video so we haven't tested it just yet I mean the plastics still on there but today we're looking at this card almost exclusively will be doing thermals games and overclocking starting with thermals our tests consist of peak average thermals using delta T over ambient and of endurance thermals that represent the GPU diode temperature only this helps us to find thermal throttle points and clock rate instability as correlated in our versus time charts let's start with the peak average thermals the GTX 1080 hydrographics lands first among the high-end Pascal GPUs in a good way at eighteen point five Celsius delta T over ambient load and this plants corsair and msi the amalgam ahead of our DIY hybrid that we built a few weeks ago this used the EVGA cooler and a less official implementation of that EVGA cooler our version of the GTX tennety hybrid the GN hybrid operates at 18.66 Celsius so it's 0.16 C warmer and has a lower clock rate than the Corsair card which of course also impacts Heat we believe that part of the difference comes from the implementation we use longer screws that weren't really meant for it and that has imperfect mounting pressure applied as a result and we also rendered the blower fan mostly useless by sacking the shroud and so neighboring components get warmer but we'll see how that does in a soon become test for reference the founders Edition GT X 1080 operates at around 50 7.51 Celsius delta T / ambience a swing of about 39 C and that's with a higher clock on the hydro graphics card here's the temperature overtime plot this shows the same data but plotted over time and demonstrates our automated test execution kicking off the load test at the same point for all cards this is mostly used for internal data integrity and validation that helps provide a look at ramp up time for each of the cards looking at our unique endurance charts this chart shows frequency versus temperature and time plotted over a two hour burnin period the clock rate is fairly tamed for the first 90 minutes with the average frequency range at about plus or minus 80 megahertz depending on boost and other factors later we start seeing hard drops to 215 megahertz and that's with an advanced cooling solution on the hydro graphics so it's clearly not a thermal issue we've seen this behavior on a couple of Pascal GPUs thus far and it always starts to happen around the same 90 to 100 minute mark at this point the clock rate will occasionally for a one-second period drop to 215 megahertz from the near 2 gigahertz mark previously one second prior we've reached out to Nvidia to ask about this anomaly and more depth as it is occurring somewhat regularly on Pascal in this instance it's not a thermal throttle obviously and likely power or boost functionality and video has informed us thus far that this is partly normal boost functionality but we're waiting for further feedback to understand better why this happened on some cards and not others on the whole though Nvidia basically says not all their cards are created equal especially with GP Boo's 3.0 and that we would need a much larger sample size to get a proper idea of what's going on but that's what the chart shows for now anyway for power consumption and noise tests check the article linked in the description below where we've got the full depth on everything for now let's go into FPS charts all our methodology again is defined in that article linked in the description below if you're curious about how we test you've used some helpful videos are also embedded which include 1% and 0.1% low definitions starting with Mirror's Edge catalyst we see the Corsair hydrographics topping the single card charts at 51 FPS average for 4k high with a 42 fps and 38 fps 1% in 0.1 percent lows respectively as usual we see the biggest improvement over SLI in the form of low values the MSI GTX 1080 gaming X clocked the same performs nearly identical e to the hydro graphics which is again a board made by MSI for the Seahawk in some games we may see some difference in FPS thanks to improved thermal solution that helps sustain a flatter clock rate for longer even though the clock is to the same spec this is something we discuss in our tight next hybrid results at 1440p were seeing 95 FPS on the hydrographics with slightly favored lows over the gaming X card founders edition 1080 is running at 89 FPS with a 1070 cards in the 72 FPS range at 1080p as expected this is no trouble for any of these devices at least not until the 960 and 460 which run below 60 FPS average the hydrographic sits at 139 average with low as minimally at 77 fps and with the 1080 game index at 137 FPS average or nearly 74 fps 0.1% lowest the founders edition card is at 135 FPS average that's a difference of 4 FPS from the hydrographics or a change of about 2.6 percent moving on to GTA 5 we see the hydrographics performing at 59 FPS average with 4k ultra settings with lows of 46 fps and 43.7 FPS that plants the corsair and msi card just above the amazon 1080 gaming x at 58 point 3 FPS average and with imperceptibly slower low FPS the eff e card sits at 56 FPS average or a change of about 5% to the hydrographics one step down the 1070 gaming X sits at 47 FPS average with significantly lower 0.1% lower values moving to 1080p GTA 5 the hydrographics is capable of pushing about 135 FPS average with tightly times lows 1080p gaming act sits at 129 at 7 FPS or a change of about 4 percent and the GT X 1080 EFI clocks at 125 FPS average so we're starting to bump up against the CPU limit in some instances with this test black ops 3 is a vendor neutral title that tends to show some favor toward Andy just the way it was optimized at 4k high we're seeing the GTX 1080 hydrographics perform at about 73 FPS average with lows that are mostly in step with the msi 1080 gaming acts they're marginally reduced as a result of boost clock functionality during this particular title but the hydrographics does maintain about a 1 FPS lead that's really all we can expect from two cards on the same silicon at this point in this particular title crossfire and SLI configurations will outperform the single 1080 hydrographics although with disproportionately lower per sentence 0.1% level metrics at 1440p we see the hydrographics pushing 143 FPS just at the 144 Hertz point for FPS players you care about that and with high sustained low metrics 1080 gaming X is about 1 to 2 percent slower with a gtx 10a TFE a full 8 FPS or 5.7 percent slower 1080p is a little unnecessary to test again but we're doing it anyway because so much of the market is still on 1080p with high settings we've still got room to go up to extra as well but we're pushing 212 FPS out the gate average with high settings and the 1080 gaming X is just behind the EFI is showing roughly a 5% change as with previous tests moving on to ashes this will be our last fps benchmark before overclocking results check the article link to the description below for additional benchmark games including Metro Mordor and the division first looking at average millisecond latency between frames the coarser hydrographics is chart-topping and ashes of the singularity for its average latency in DX 12 posting 12 point nine nine milliseconds between frames the MSI gaming X sits at thirteen point one nine milliseconds with Fe card at thirteen point three eight crossfire Rx for ATS are the next trailing configuration at thirteen point eight eight milliseconds average in DX twelve but with way worse dx11 frame time is partially an artifact of multi-gpu looking instead at FPS the 1080 hydrographics at 1080p is posting seventy six point nine five FPS average for DX 12 25 fps a gain over DX 11 performance the same scaling is shown for the 1080 Fe though that card is about two FPS lower on average than the hydrographics moving to 4k high and ashes shows the hydrographics just above 60 FPS average at 62 203 the 1080 gaming X is a couple FPS slower at fifty nine point six FPS average with the crossfire cards but in between the FeO and the gaming X again for more game benchmarks check the article linked in the description below and now that we've gone through the basics of these we're gonna go through some of the overclocking so for that if you want to see that methodology again down below it's a lot of words so how can I go through it in every single video overclocking methodology is basically the same as it's always been for us we're using manual tuning rather than scan it with C it just doesn't work well for what we're trying to do here's a look at our overclock stepping chart for the GTX 1080 hydrographics we ultimately landed at twenty one twenty six megahertz peak core clock that's the max with an average baseline of about twenty fifty megahertz reliably the core offset was stable at plus one seventy-five megahertz with a fairly sizable memory overclock as shown here power target only gets offset by five percent on this particular card so 105 percent is your max and GPU v core seems to peak at one point oh five volts here's a look at the FPS impact we're seeing a couple FPS maximally in some titles shadow of mordor and mirrors edge being two of them but that's about it the card is mostly at its limit out of the box despite an increased range with the overclock that's so much the performance we've seen with every other 1080 thus far part of this limit comes down to power again 105 percent offset there's not a lot of room for extra power draw that's permissible anyway through the software and without volt mahad and hard mods and then part of it is v bios can't really increase voltage with these cards it just doesn't work and the max we're getting is 1.0 5 volts so not a huge push on that with the overclocking support at $750 Corsair an msi are certainly asking a lot for the hydro graphics or the Seahawk if you prefer it's not unreasonable given the price of the founders Edition card which kind of shakes up the market a bit in some ways that we don't necessarily agree with but prices should fall eventually this though is certainly a value-add it's an extra $50 or so over the founders edition card so it's asking more money but you're getting the liquid cooler with it as I understand it this thing should fall out about 7:30 so we'll be looking at this shortly but strictly speaking to this card performance is about the same as every other GTX 1080 as one would expect this is not news to any GPU or architecture they pretty much perform within a few percent of each other until you really get into extreme overclock and that's just because the silicon is exactly the same naturally so FPS out of the box is more or less the same this is technically the chart-topper it is the best performer on the charts right now for single graphics card configurations and power management and v bios limitations for this generation do seem to somewhat invalidate some of the higher and fancier boards like the custom PCBs and higher-end VRMs things like that so Coursera and Imus are getting away just fine with the sort of bare-bones vrm and PCB for this setup because they're not targeting hard mods volt mods extreme overclockers folks like that so if you're not one of those people the configuration here is pretty much fine there is some certainly some power limitation but it's hard to be too mad about a 20 50 megahertz offs or overclock total 175 megahertz offset it's not as good as our founders Edition card that we overclocked and especially not as good as it after we applied liquid to it we were able to hit 21 something 21 68 I believe megahertz with a peak of 2200 - that was unstable at that point so not quite there but that seems consistent with a lot of these 10 80s that are not the the sample that we got initially it must have been a good sample overall thermally this is far and away superior to all the other cards we've looked at right now it's very close to the DIY hybrid we built which leads me to believe it should be very close to this competition will be really tight between the two cards depending on even the EVGA implementation outside of what we did their solution may be better than what we saw previously but it is a higher overclock as well it's actually a little bit higher than this card pre overclocked though if you're changing the settings anyway it doesn't really matter what it comes stocked because that's easily made up for the hydro graphics is undeniably the highest performer of the single GP is currently on the bench including the MSI GTX 1080 gaming decks that we previously tested start performing the founders edition card by about 5 to 6 percent most games stock further validating our statement that the reference designs from both Andy and Nvidia are generally best foregone by consumers in this market the next thing for you to do is to wait for this review should be coming out very shortly now that we finally have one it'll be an interesting battle for sure $750 I don't think is unfair but I think it's a bit too much on average and I felt the same way about the $700 card so I would wait a little while hopefully these fall on price a bit something in the 700 to 730 range does feel better 750 is pushing it a bit much for me personally of course your mileage may vary depending on how much money you have so that's kind of the basics of it if you want more depth as always the article will cover it the thermals are of course the most interesting check back for more on that with this one the differences between these two will be discussed in that content so thank you for watching as always pay traveling the post all video links in the description below for more information subscribe for more content I'll see you all next time you it smells like the beach
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