Gadgetory

we're finally reviewing the real EVGA GTX 1080 hybrid and that is this card right here it's got a bit more official set up than what we used for our own DIY hybrid that we built a few months ago and the 1080 launched this one is using an FTW PCB is custom PCB more advanced power delivery and management system which in theory will benefit overclocking we'll look at that soon and it's got a much more elegant cooling solution that we'll look at shortly though to be fair pretty tough to beat hours in terms of elegance before we get into the review of the 1080 FTW hybrid this content is brought to you by iBUYPOWER and the new element gaming PC which uses it a modified NZXT s340 case a large tempered glass side window front window and LEDs everywhere so we just reviewed the Seahawk that's this thing also known as the hydro graphics card this is a Seahawk ex from MSI and Corsair they work together coarser does the cooling solution I won't go through it all here we already reviewed it but the main comparison here today is between these two devices not really any other 1080 because we want to look at specifically to liquid quality cards I don't have a gigabyte water force yet so tell them to send us one but that's what we're looking at today for the full review as always that link in the description below we've got power testing and noise testing and a couple of extra games there that you won't find here so do check that for more depth but let's get straight into it here in terms of core specifications the $730 1080 FTW hybrid still obviously is a GP 104 - 400 GPU that's the 1080 as expected but it has fitted the GPU on a custom PCB with a 10 phase V core vrm and 2 phase of memory voltage BRM EVGA is using on semiconductor power phases and MOSFETs with a doubler and we've got a PCB analysis coming up in full from build Zoid soon on our channel if that interests you further the clock runs at 18 60 megahertz boosted so 13 megahertz higher than the seahawks advertised boost and uses 2 8 pin PCIe headers to drive power to the board as opposed to the single 8 pin header on the Seahawk X this is because MSI opted to use a reference F II board for its PCB and so is limited by the very same components found on the founders Edition including the 5+1 phase power design and single 8-pin power header RGB LEDs are also present on the EVGA card for those who care about such things and can be driven through software more to the performance side though EVGA uses a master slave switch which can be toggled to drive even more power to the GPU for overclocking something we'll discuss in our OC section cooling is handled by the same ASA tech 4.5 a gen liquid cooler but with the EVGA model as opposed to the seahawk MSI model the EVGA model is using a protruded copper cold plate that's quite a bit different in terms of at least how it looks and we'll see how it performs shortly EVGA has also got some more unique cooling methods to dissipate heat from the vram but before talking about the vram cooling note that corsair also uses a 4.5 gen cooler from ASA Tech and now uses a flattened cold plate to better conduct heat from the GPU silicon since there's no IHS curvature as would be accommodated by a CPU CLC used in the previous generation this is actually a big deal for performance and is an improvement over the 980ti seahawk hydrographics previous generation cards there's a big story to thermals here and that's because mostly the EVGA card was actually running worse than we expected during initial tests so we ran an additional 10 or so tests on this card using all different configurations between the cooler the fan and the cooler and the fan on this card swapping them things like that to control for all the variables possible and we also looked at voltage control for another potential difference pulling the hybrid apart to take a closer look is what gave us an idea finally of what was causing the disparity and that's with the vram cooling sync that we talked about in a previous video but also we're about to talk about right now from our automated thermal test with the stock cards we're seeing a thermal performance output that lands the EVGA 1080 FTW hybrid at 29.6 1 Celsius delta T over a means which isn't only not that good but also far from what we expected the corsair hydrographics which theoretically uses a worse cooler but does use a better fan to its favour and also a lower voltage is that eighteen point five Celsius delta T that's eleven sauciest cooler than EVGA is card this is what prompted all the tests that we ran shortly after including a swap of the fans increasing the Corsair V to match EVGA s an even request in a second hybrid to validate that we didn't have a leaky card the FTW hybrid is using a copper plate to cool its memory much different from the aluminum base plate of the FTW non-hybrid card by the way and a copper plate contacts the c LC called plate with ten between the interfaces this means that like the gigabyte liquid cooled solution EVGA is now conducting the heat generated by vram modules into a copper plate that is shared with the GPU CLC if you're asking if this increases the GPU diode temperature when compared to the Seahawk a solution which cools its memory using only the base plate and a blower fan the answer is yes here's a look at the results from our test where we remove the copper plate from the equation completely and cooled only the GPU with the CL C Inlet air handle the view ramp the 1080 FTW hybrid is now sitting at 23 Celsius load which is about seven point four C cooler than when the vram shared the CLC that's not to say that our hacked solution is better it's actually not but it proves the hypothesis that EVGA is temperatures are primarily higher because of the decision to cool the vram and the GPU with the c LC rather than the more simple solution that is normally taken as for why it looks like GPU temperatures increase that's just because the liquid cooler can only deal with so much heat at once and it's becoming saturated between the GPU and the vram so the diode of the GPU has a perceived increase in temperature the rest of the heat accounting for the gap between the 23.1 celsius variant and 18.5 celsius of the seahawk can be concluded largely as a higher voltage on the EVGA card coupled with EVGA zwarst fan here's another set of test data with these configurations we learned that EVGA c LC outperforms the corsair c LC when we control for the specific PCB and fan and we learned that the corsair fan outperforms the EVGA fan and the worse solution together was to use the EVGA fan with the corsair CLC on the Seahawk actually considerably worse with the Seahawk now at twenty four point six C instead of its original eighteen point five Celsius value before moving on to fps here's a quick look at our endurance overtime chart to our burnin note that maxing out the power limit will flatten the clock rate more aggressively which is what we want the boost 3.0 behavior does still tank frequency when it thinks it can get away with outs of power savings even though you lose a little bit on the 0.1% low frame time side the dives aren't nearly as bad in this case as when we were thermally limited like with the tight necks but it's still obviously a jumpy frequency internally the EVGA hybrid solution is actually somewhat brilliant because of the way they're prioritizing the vram cooling over what we normally see like in this card or even the previous generation EVGA hybrid 980ti or really most other liquid cooled cards on the market if you're using something like an Arctic cooling kit and again it's because of the way the vram and the GPU share the same CLC so liquid is effectively cooling both though it's indirectly cooling the vram it's still far greater dissipation than what you get with an aluminum plate and air because you're looking at a 400 watt per meter Kelvin dissipation potential on the copper solution at 25 C anyway and then you're cooling it with liquid so that's a far greater potential in terms of cooling ability than air and aluminum or whatever may be the case for the standard card that you're talking about now whether or not that tangibly impacts performance is something we'll look at in the overclocking section because that of course matters too it doesn't matter how good it seems on paper it matters if it actually impacts your gaming or the price of the product at the end of the day the FPS section will be quick this time since we've already explained all these numbers in the hydro graphics review and in the article for the hybrid starting with Mirror's Edge catalyst at 4k high we see the EVGA 1080 FTW hybrid mouthful card performing effectively identically to the MSI seahawk X both of which sit at 51 point 3 FPS average 42.3 fps 1% blows and with very close to your 0.1% blow as the only differentiator is in the 0.1% low value and that difference is not significant looking at 1440p ultra the FTW hybrid post 95 FPS average the same as the hydrographics aka seahawk X and 1080 gaming acts more or less with measurably but imperceptibly improved 1% low-end 0.1% low values or the founders edition card the Seahawk aka hydro graphics and the hybrid are posting an approximate 6.7% performance improvement and this is consistent in most of our tests and is true to of the gaming ax since it's got the same clock rate in similar baseline spec to that of the Seahawk X stock 1080p pushes us to 139 FPS average for both devices again with the hybrid managing a marginal gain no significant difference but a measurable gap nonetheless this is accounted for in the 13 megahertz clock rate change to some extent but the cards can be seen as equivalent moving on to GTA 5 at 1080p we're hitting 130 4.7 FPS average for both the FTW hybrid and the hydro graphics the cards are as expected about equal both post performance gains over the FE card of about 7.5% definitely noteworthy but between the two liquid cooled options specifically the FPS is about the same and the same is true at 4k where each device is 59 FPS average the FE card at 56 FPS average is about 5.4 percent change or slower than the two cards were looking at here looking now to black ops 3 the FTW hybrid at 4k is pushing 73 FPS average about equal to the hydro graphics card again aka Seahawk X we're still at a gain of about 7.3 percent over the reference card and priced pretty similarly at this point 1440p isn't much more exciting the hybrid and Seahawk X are again equal mostly with no significant difference between the results 1080p is a little light for these cards when configured to high settings but both were tested and the FTW hybrid finally posts a slight gain but the test variants at this point increases because the frame rate is so high so there's more room for potential error or just variants in the test results because again we're over 200 FPS as for ashes of the singularity it's more of the same average frame latencies are a tenth of a millisecond off for 1080p high the FPS at 1080p high is also within a fraction of a frame between the Seahawk x and FTW hybrid and the 4k high FPS similarly post near equal results nothing exciting again as expected for two cards of such close frequency for more benchmarks including doom on Vulcan and OpenGL Metro last light shadow of mordor and a couple other things power tests things like that check the article linked in the description below and now we're just going to move straight into overclocking this is our overclocked progression for the 1080 FTW hybrid it's the same in terms of OSI instruction as other Pascal devices we've overclocked using sliders in afterburner or precision we're able to get up to a stable clock of 2150 one point five megahertz with peaks 220 164 megahertz it's not quite as high as what we got in our own review sample F II card when we put it under liquid through DIY modding but that's a tough comparison because it seems we got somewhat of a good sample regardless Eevee JS 1080 FTW hybrid is hitting 2150 1.5 megahertz core with our OC and 11.2 5 gigahertz effective memory overclock it would appear that the advanced memory cooling does not noticeably impact the memory overclock Headroom because we see these numbers on pretty much every 1080 card so it's difficult to quantify just how useful EVGA is elegant solution may or may not be the shared cooling at this point mostly impacts review charts because the practical differences at this point are pretty narrow but GPU temperatures are a solid 10 C higher with this configuration so that obviously shows up in the charts more than anything we cannot reasonably measure the vram temperatures without embedding thermocouples carefully in a few different test units and that's not something we're doing today the unit Peaks at 1081 millivolts a limitation of Pascal and is able to toggle to 130 percent when the master slave switch is switched for reference this is what the msi seahawk x overclocked stepping looks like on the screen now we got stuck around 20 50 megahertz it's got a lower power target offset and the card uses a reference efi board and power configuration which is far weaker in terms of its voltage and power management potential that puts EVGA about 100 megahertz faster in the overclock dept for core but the memory OC is about the same so again that thermal solution although elegant doesn't really impact much in terms of overclock potential out of the box regardless an extra 100 megahertz over the closest liquid competitor is a reasonable gain and these FPS charts show the small few point percentage differences as a result of that extra 100 megahertz the GN hybrid sits just above the EVGA 1080 hybrid and OC capabilities at 21 64 megahertz and with the highest FPS of all the 1080s we've yet tested and again that was a DIY model including the 1080 game index which also maxes 20 50 megahertz at $730 EVGA s hybrid solution comes in cheaper than the Seahawk it's got a better pc d better power staging a better overclock output and a more complex thermal solution even though the diode temperatures appear higher in the charts because of the way they're cooling the vram in addition to the GPU core gigabyte sort of pioneered this solution with the water force cards especially for this generation the 1080 generation which we have not yet received and they seem somewhat inspired by the fury X which came out about a year ago at this point reviewed then even J's taking the idea and distilled it into something that does seem a bit more affordable than the nearest competitor and it works theoretically well but again the practical difference is not necessarily there objectively the EVGA FTW hybrid is a superior PCB to the reference board used on the Seahawk it's got higher overclock Headroom than the Seahawk if you're looking for fun overclocking you won't get much of that with Pascal at all but you will certainly get more on the FTW hybrid then again on the Seahawk from our limited sample size testing the cooling solution is certainly more interesting and is one we're genuinely excited about but its efficacy is difficult to quantify given the already low temperature performance of gddr5 X and the equivalent memory overclocked to cheaper cards one thing we're curious about is why evj didn't extend their copper plate to the VRM if feasible and it looks like it is because that would help drive down the temperatures of the VRM obviously potentially give more room to OC depending on what's getting too hot I don't think it's the vrm though I think we're hitting voltage or power or basically Pascal boost limitations more than anything but still it would have been cool to see as for the small things RGB LEDs help differentiate the card in a market which otherwise posts nearly equivalent FPS results between high-end cards the 1080 gaming X air-cooled card Seahawk and 1080 FTW hybrid all output about the same FPS and are normally within one to two percent of each other if that much the cars are appreciably faster than the FE reference card often six to seven percent slower than the FTW hybrid but $730 makes EVGA FTW hybrid $20 more affordable than the Seahawk X and hydrographics it uses a better board and has more OC potential we still think that these cards should all be to the $700 mark EVGA is included but 730 is moving in the right direction minimally MSI and Corsair should drop their prize to compete with EVGA they've got a simpler cooling solution a reference PCB a cheap vrm a cheap plastic shroud and a lack of LEDs which although maybe not significant is still a cost and there's no reason for the Seahawk to exist at its higher price point then the FTW hybrid and that aligns with what we said in our review of the Seahawk card both are decent cards but the price becomes the hinge point between the two and right now it is in favor of the EVGA hybrid at $20 cheaper I'd still like to see the prices drop to closer to 700 overall though but that is it for this content as always patreon link in the post roll video if you want to help us out directly by supporting us there subscribe for more content as always and I'll see you all next time by the way link in the description below hey everyone I am Linus from Linus tech tips and today we're talking about the new GT X 1080 hybrid video card which is Dennis