Gadgetory

after the initial review of the gtx 980ti we learned to that better cooling would provide more thermal Headroom for clock boosting without the need to blast fan noise our reviews of the gaming ex and gigabyte extreme RS cards furthered that conclusion but also necessitated an extra $50 spend over MSRP today we're looking at EVGA GTX 10 ATT is c2 priced at seven hundred twenty dollars and using EVGA Zhai CX design that we exhaustively detailed in our 1080 ftw2 IC x review before that this content is brought to you by our patreon backers you can go to patreon.com/scishow selves out directly which helps us with this in-depth reporting because it takes quite a bit of time and that direct support is necessary you can also go to store dot gamers nexus dotnet if you prefer to pick up one of our three new shirt designs when EVGA launched its icx design in February we really heavily detailed it so if you're not familiar with IC x vs AC X you might want to check out that previous content we did a be testing with AC X versus IC X on the same physical GPU and all that stuff to figure out what exactly I see X does now at a very top level to recap every one IC x this PCB here is equipped with a couple of thermistor so they are NTC they're negative type thermistors that are hooked up to nine different components on the board including GPU backside which isn't really all that useful but gu backside there are a couple of memory thermistors mounted and then I believe five power thermistors mounted these are not mounted within the die itself or on the package but basically adjacent and we previously validated that EVGA thermistors read about the same as our thermocouples do when we mount them to the same spot so they are accurate and they are useful primarily for determining if the vrm components or the RAM components are running at temperatures that make sense now are they necessary absolutely not but as we determined in the 1080 FTW to review the IC XF is innovative and it's different and that alone is worth notice but it is just a matter of do you want an extra toy to play with because it's not going to improve your game experience it just gives you more stuff to look at and play around with which if you like that fantastic it's worth looking at other than that functionally the real advantage of icx is just having different fan speeds for the fans on the cooler so the marketing language would be asynchronous fans which really just means that the vrm fan and the GPU fan can spin at different speeds depending on the temperatures of each the 1080i models have the thermistors in different locations from the 1080 models which means that you cannot directly compare the two chips for or I should say the two cards for thermals which is a shame because it'd be really cool to do but we can do that anyway with our thermocouple mounting so we'll have that data separately now as for the cooling design this stuff is somewhat simple it's stuff that we've all seen before but EVGA iterated on it a bit number one thing they have gone absolutely mental with their thermal pad placement they've definitely over compensated and making up for the thermal pad incident last year so you can see all that here in terms of things that are actually cool this is the base plate base plates are not too exciting the fin stack here they are calling these pin fins it's just cylindrical fins they are made out of aluminum they stick out of the base plate and they are used for helping to spread heat over a larger surface area from the memory modules and the capacitor banks that are located directly below the fin stack so these give you more surface area just like the small bumps over here do how much does it help hard to say because we cannot do a/b testing this time because the mountains a bit different from a CX and IC x from the 1080 to the 1080 TI so hard to say exactly how much that helps but other than that they've added a heat pipe here which is a bit different so the heat pipe is a single heat pipe it looks like it's about a six millimeter pipe and that connects to a copper plate so this copper base plate is connected to the fat so you've got connections straight to the MOSFETs with this part of the plate and then the rest of it connects to the inductors pretty good coverage overall but we'll test the thermals roll into that stuff first methodology as always is defined in the article if you don't know our testing methods you can click that link and check it out we use thermocouples to help validate numbers though this board has a thermistors attached so we don't need as many of them and yet we can dive into thermals versus frequency first it helps to get a feel for the cards baseline behaviors prior to getting further into testing so for that we're looking at frequency versus thermals and time with the 1080i SETI CX card this helps us understand how the clock fluctuates based on temperatures the max clock range is about 114 megahertz from peak to dip with temperatures controlled around 65 C look at individual power stage and memory temperatures in moment first let's look at a comparative chart with competition on the screen our GPU comparison chart contains over a year of data at this point and it's gotten pretty unwieldy so will crop it into just the stuff we're talking about today most notably the 1080 t is see too icx card runs a GPIO temperature of 49 6 Celsius delta T over ambient went under load which is significantly cooler than the 1080 TI f e card that's running at warm at 58 C delta T over ambient I see X card also manages its temperature at a lower noise footprint which I'd be expected given the aftermarket cooler look at noise in a few minutes and the msi 1080i gaming X runs at 40 4.3 Scelzi delta T about 3 °c warmer than EVGA sse2 I see X card a gigabyte extreme Oris version of the 1080i operates at about the same temperature as MSI card making EVGA is 1080i SSC to the coolest operating gtx 980ti that we've yet tested with the stock fan profile other than just the cooling solution the fans things like that there's another reason for this so the extreme Oris card is sinking the vram into the same cold plate that is connected to the GPU we talked about this in our extreme or at review we talked about in the game and extra view that means that the vram is getting cooled by the same solution as a GPU which is great for the vram but your GPIO temperature will look a bit higher because you're sinking more heat from more devices into the same plate and it's only got so much before it's reaching up basically a thermal saturation where you have more heat going through the same solution so that drives temperatures up that's part of the difference the difference is still favoring EVGA and the icx sensors as we'll see momentarily do show that the rest of the temperatures are just fine even without that cold plate helping out we've heard suggestions that the new hole riddled faceplate could actually benefit the thermals over previous EVGA faceplate design since the shroud covers so much of the cooling area in those older designs without a compatible shrouds amounts the card the best way to a/b test this was to close off the hole so we pulled our Gavit tape and plugged them all up to look something like a Brigantine patchwork video card then we ran the thermals this will block off air channels in a similar fashion to filling the holes with the shroud so we'll simulate a closed off base plate we're accounting for ambient fluctuations in this first chart with a modifier value based on thermocouple readings of the intake temperature these tests were conducted at 50% fan speed to ensure the fans did not adjust to higher temperatures between a/v execution we also ran auto tests and found the same results but we'll be using the 50% fan speed numbers for this presentation we can add GPS diode temperature over time we can see that our a/b test posts no real difference between the taped line represented an orange and the stock line in blue the temperatures are within one celsius of each other at all times and ramp up is a similar pace the tape version does take a slightly wider arc to cool down but isn't anything extreme even idle temperatures are roughly equal the same is true for memory module number one as seen in this next chart idle temperature at the start is about equal ramp up temperature and time is roughly equal and steady state temperature is roughly equal cool down takes a marginally wider arc again but achieve the same end result in about the same amount of time and MOSFET number five shows the same behavior with a bit of an anomaly in the first quarter of the test that's likely just from modulated load on the power virus if we switch now it's one of G on the EQ charts we can see that the tests are all roughly equal the biggest change we have is in power five which can be accounted for in that anomalous spike in our previous overtime chart that we showed just a second ago everything else is within a 1 Celsius range for the most part if not less and that is with ambient accounted for like gigabytes copper insert that we talked out in the Xtreme RS review this base plate is largely for looks it's not necessarily a bad thing but it's really not going to help with the cooling design so if you're looking at this base plate and thank you it's better for thermals unless you're pointing a side intake fan straight at it and you mount the card vertically in something like I don't know of any cases beside intake and a vertical GPU mount but if you get one maybe there would be a difference but in our testing there's really no difference that leads not one to speak of not one that is significant enough to confidently declare that open versus closed for these holes is beneficial or not it is effectively the same when it is taped off closed or when it is open and if you were buying this card based on the faceplate do it because you like how it looks not because it's better thermally because that is not the case so this is similar to the gigabyte copper backplate insert that they have that we tested recently no real difference it's really just a looks thing we're moving now to noise testing conducted at twenty inches away from the system with all passive components inside aside from the video card a noise floor of the room is about 26 DBA and the EVGA card runs the same idle noise as the other cards with a zero spin fan policy that is it makes no noise when idle those fans toggle off when under a 55 Celsius load and spin up asynchronously based on the load for each half of the card EVGA is the fault fan profile seems to auto spin at around 1600 rpm for the left fan and about 1700 rpm for the right then resulting in a noise output of about 42 DBA or about 3 to 4 decibels louder than the MSI's card at its auto speed of around 55% and around 4 to 5 dB a quieter than the founders vision card as a similar fan speed EVGA could actually run a much more conservative fan profile if they wanted to though they'd sacrifice thermal performance to some extent at 50% fan speeds for each fan which is something that almost never happens on this card the EVGA SC 2 card runs at 40 at 7.6 DBA output all of these GPAs run at or below 55 percent fan speeds in real-world scenarios that we've tested so the 100% value isn't really critical here it's more of just a validation thing EVGA does have the fastest fans of its size which means a louder output when maxed out completely but you'll ultimately never really be at 100% anyway unless you manually tell your card on that fast so the thing runs fine when it's Auto you could go into the fan profile with EVGA precision and configure a better one right now the vrm fan is kicking on at around 55 C and it spins up fairly quickly and it doesn't need to spin that fast because the RM components can take a hell of a lot more heat than a GPU so even though a 100 C would look scary on any other type of component you're used to really it's not a huge deal for the VRMs now you don't want to run that high just because you're producing a lot more heat in the tight area that's on the PCB and that starts heating up other components and you eventually start derating and losing efficiency but you could approach 100 C and be ok so the fat temperatures are actually pretty low on this thing when you're using the auto profile that is largely I would guess because EVGA when they put these ICS sensors on there they realize that there's a marketing concern of we are now giving users who may not necessarily understand these temperatures a look into the temperature of power components and if they start seeing high numbers they're going to freak out which is a completely valid concern so if you know what you're doing at least to some remote extent if you watched our channel you could go in there configure a fan profile for the vrm fan that would be this one and slow it down a little bit it doesn't need to run as fast as they do the temperatures would be fine and you would lower your noise profile at which point the EVGA icx cards sc2 would now compete with a Maasai's gaming X in both thermals and noise rather than mostly just in the thermal Dept we're gonna move on to FPS benchmarking next so the thin here with these GPUs we've done a lot of 1080p is now the numbers are all basically the same that's what you would expect when you have any GPU and all you're doing is changing the PCB in the cooler the benchmark numbers for gaming it will look mostly the same this is largely a thermal and noise comparison so the the game benchmarks will be more limited in the video if you want all of them they will be linked in the article below that includes Sniper Elite for ashes of the singularity and maybe one other game that we won't talk about here along with 3dmark but for now we'll step through some of the game benchmarks we've got overclock numbers on our benchmarks here as well so here's an OC stepping table that shows the a spell progress of overclocking the gtx 980ti sc2 you can see where we settled it towards the bottom of the list of the last passing numbers but those were a little bit tight it was unstable in some scenarios we stepped it back a couple megahertz and that's where we landed ultimately starting on our FPS benchmarks with Ghost Recon wildlands at 4k the EVGA 1080 is see too icx card runs an average FPS about 59 with 1% low is at 52 and 48 FPS on the 0.1% level metrics this ranks the sp2 between the msi 1080i gaming x stock and the overclocked values and just behind our own overclocked natt I found Edition GN hybrid mod which was a liquid-cooled mod of the FE card stock performance for all of these 10 atti cards is more or less equal with differences primarily in power limitations and out of box configuration for the clocks we were able to overclock the EVGA SC to a bit higher than the gaming X card that we overclock pushing it up to 62 FPS average with lows at 53 and 49 the horas place is next at 61 average effectively identical to the sc2 and performance placement is mostly the same at 1440p with the EVGA sc2 card stock running an average of 95 fps flanked on either side by the 1080i extreme or s card at 94 FPS on the gaming X overclocked cards note that the gaming x OC numbers are showing some loss in frame times in the lows that dither more with clock fluctuation overclocking the sc2 gets us up to about 99 FPS average with lows at 86 and 81 fps sc2 is more stable with this overclock than our gaming act some extreme overclocked both of which had hits to frame time consistency with an OC as said the hits weren't all that critical to overall performance and were not noticeable as an end-user 1080p results lambda sc2 at 122 FPS average more or less tied with the gigabyte extreme card overclocking allows the sc2 to chart top once again with another narrow victory over the nearby 1080i followers Mass Effect Andromeda is next with 4k performance topped by the gigabyte extreme card by insignificant amounts followed by the sc2 and gaming act cards closely the founders edition card for references plants at around 65 FPS average with the thermal limits removed thanks to our hybrid mod that would be a bit lower that's a cooler 1440p posts the same performance stack with sc2 flanked again by the stock game in action auras cards and you can check the article for 1080p at Mass Effect Andromeda results if you are interested in those or if you need more time in the 1440p chart with doom and Vulcan the 1080i performance is all the same stack as the previous game we're seeing differences of a few FPS at most as you'd expect capacity to card landing marginally ahead of the extreme horas and behind the gaming acts from MSI overclocking again gets us between the extreme Oris and msi gaming overclocked cards moving on now to for honor at 4k the gtx 1080i sc2 ends at around 31 FPS average with lows at 64 and 61 this is followed by the 1080i F II card with our hybrid model 70 FPS or just straight F II card at 66 FPS average that's a reasonable gain over the reference card with the reference cooler but not as distant from the gaming action extreme auras cards 1440p parcel SC to card between the gaming ex hybrid F II and extreme auras cards again with no real significant advantages for any of these 1080p results will be in the article if you really want to see them so for sniper lis ashes and 3d mark benchmarks check the article below as for the conclusion of this one the card is slightly louder than the gaming ax unless you control it manually once you start controlling the fans individually and manually you can get lower noise outputs at about the same temperature values as the gaming ax or the extreme RS card and even stock the noise isn't that much louder it is about 4 DB a louder so it's noticeable to the human ear you can pick up the difference but it's not terrible at least not until you get into 100% fan speeds with any of these devices at which point they are all completely unbearable so slightly louder than the gaming ax you can manually control if you want to to account for that it's a bit cooler to be fair to the sc2 it does run a couple degrees Celsius cooler than the gaming X does and then the gigabyte extreme horas card does so out of the box the GPIO temperature is superior on this one but again we have to account for that vram difference where the cooling the vram on the other two cards with an extended base plate so you're sinking more stuff into one copper plate so that is worth noting now gaming performance is the same on all of the devices the only difference here is if you're getting something like a founders Edition card or another blower based card where it's using a low-end blower fan with a shroud that covers the entire thing and has no significant coin to speak of underneath a few of those exist the ACS turbo is one of them MSI normally sells one of those types of cards and then Nvidia sells the F II card that's the only place you're going to see a significant difference in gaming performance because ultimately what we're talking about here is a thermal limit and then once you get past the thermal limit you run into a power or a voltage limit and that's going to happen on all of these cards no matter what because NVIDIA has hard limitations on the voltage and you've got other limitations on the power based on my card design and ultimately voltage as well so you can only push these things so far overclocking yes we got this one higher it did fantastic and the results at chart topped the gaming benchmarks when it was overclocked however overclocking is a lot more based on the chip quality than the card itself so while it would be great to point at any one of these cards and say this is a fantastic overclocker it's not really how it works ultimately it comes down to the chip quality the quality of this thing right here is more important than anything else on this board with regard to overclocking once you've accounted for thermal limitations and ideally power which they've done here so over thought it was good but they're all kind of the same gaming they're all kind of the same you see where I'm going with this the only difference is in noise temperatures and price the price of this one is $720 it still has a good cooler noise is okay you can account for where it's not and it's 30 bucks cheaper than the other two we've reviewed which are the extreme ores and the gaming X now the extreme Oris has a cooler RGB LEDs if that's something you really care about it does do those better than this does but if you want to spend $30 for it that's really up to you that's that's a judgment call only you can make ultimately $720 better price than 750 our cards better cooler than the $700 turbo type cards however there is still $700 cards with decent coolers on we just haven't looked at them yet gigabyte has one of them the wind forest cards and I'm interested in looking at those only because if we take in all these things stated about gaming performance being the same and overclocking mean roughly the same on the cards so far if we take that get a $700 card with a decent cooler on it then should you just buy that card that's what it comes down to you but for now this is the best one we've tested in terms of price of performance however if you want LEDs look at the gigabyte odorous if you want the bigger fans that are a bit quieter look at the gaming ex from MSI and if you want something cheaper hang on we'll look around for more on that as always you can subscribe for more patreon.com slash Cameron taxes if you want to UPS that directly gamers ex has done that for more story doc gamers accessed on that if you want to buy a shirt like this one with tu average one percent and point one percent little bars on it thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you