Gadgetory

hey everyone i am steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're talking about EVGA gtx 980ti hybrid video card and this video card is a hybrid card in the sense that it uses two forms of cooling is a liquid cooler an AC LC or closed-loop liquid cooler and it also uses a blower fan with the traditional aluminum heatsink design and it cools the vrm and vram modules that way with the CL c being used for the GPU itself the 980ti hybrid is the same as all other 980ti is it's the same GM 200 chip it's the same 28:16 CUDA cores the only major difference here other than the cooler is that it has a slightly boosted core clock and boost clock when shipped as the EVGA model so this card we have here is shipped at 11:40 megahertz the reference design just for frame of reference is a 1,000 megahertz clock so we've got a boost of 140 over reference and then the boost clock of EVGA is unit is 12 28 megahertz over the 1075 of the reference design so it doesn't sound like a huge number and in my previous overclocking video I showed that on the reference design you can actually achieve a 1440 40 megahertz overclock with the 980 TI and that's a pretty substantial overclock with actually substantial increases in framerate as well but we were thermally limited there was a thermal ceiling because the reference cooler although it is pretty good for what it is was not capable of allowing an extreme overclock on the 980 TI it just it's too hot it's pushed to its limits so that's where EVGA is 980ti hybrid comes in and that's what we're reviewing today looking at the thermal is the power draw and the frame rate performance EVGA is hybrid 980ti is a $770 video card so that puts about 120 dollars over the reference design which is a 650 dollar card and if you already own the reference card you can purchase the modding kit which is basically just this faceplate the underlying mounting bracket and the CLC and a stack CLC for $100 so that's a slightly better deal whether or not the card itself is worth it is something we'll momentarily but those are your two options if you're looking into a liquid-cooled gtx 980ti right now and overclocking is the same as with all other maxwell overclocking i've talked about this for about a year now hasn't changed so you've got your power percent target which you can increase to 110 percent on this card and some cards needle again or 25% that just means you have 10 percent or 25 percent in those two examples over the base TDP of the card to supply more wattage to the card for overclocking you can change the voltage of course for increased overhead and stability and you can change the core clock and memory clock that's all there is to it pretty straightforward but the power percent target is the one item that has changed overclocking reasonably for the Maxwell series this overclocking table shows our stepping for the overclocking and you've got the pass and fail here on the right side the far right is the endurance test the second to the most on the right is the short-term test about five minutes of burnin just to make sure it's stable before we move to the endurance test and on the 980ti hybrid a final value of a 160 megahertz to offset resulted in a 15 14 megahertz max clock the reference card rested at 255 megahertz offset or 1444 megahertz max clock and the reason the offset is higher for the reference card is simply because the base frequency for the reference card is lower than the EVGA hybrid which is 11 40 megahertz which is a thousand so you've got a 140 jump there in this thermal stable this is a new one I'm doing it's thermals over time so you see temperature which is delta T over ambient over time and ambience 21c source subtracting that from the absolute temperature which gives us the delta so we're subtracting ambient here and in the thermals table you're looking at now the orange and green represent the hybrid and the reference card is shown in red blue and purple and then you've got your legend on the right side the clock for clock reference is in green and purple and that's going to be the most linear for the reference versus hybrid in terms of thermals because we set the clock authentically to each other that way you look in strictly at the cooler performance itself so we see how well does the CLC perform how well does the air + aluminum heatsink perform in the clock 4 o'clock testing this test takes place over 20 minutes it's automated so it lines up almost perfectly to the second and because of this we can see that the CLC cooled unit this one is actually slower to heat up so it's it's not only a lower temperature overall but it takes longer to achieve its maximum temperature this next chart shows the delta T over ambient average values once equilibrium is reached so we wait until there's equilibrium so basically when the CPU or in this case the GPU sits at something like 80 Celsius before subtracting ambient and it just sort of stays there take all those numbers average them and produce this delta T over ambient average chart and this shows that the 980ti hybrid ad stock settings 1140 megahertz runs at 20 2.91 Celsius and the overclocked version at 15 14 megahertz a pretty big jump is that 24 Celsius reference is nearly three times as hot in the 60s delta T and it's not quite dangerous but it is definitely a limiter and because this is delta T you need to remember that 60 something Celsius measurement is actually 80 in the real world for a standard 70 degree Fahrenheit home if you're seeing that at that range ambient your overclocked and and reference performance will be at around 80 Celsius pretty hot and it's approaching the 90 Celsius TJ Max limiter that Nvidia sets power consumption is effectively identical across all devices tested there's no disparity that's noteworthy here I think the worst-case scenario is 7 watts which is pretty insubstantial this point and is within the margin of test error because we're manually logging the wattage drawn over time so basically the same which makes sense because we're all we're doing is changing the cooler we're not changing the GPU itself and finally here are a couple of game benchmarks showing the FPS performance of various games for the most part the hybrid card exceeds Titan X Performance pre overclocked and where it doesn't is very close to beating the Titan X card grid Autosport is sort of a weird game and that the Titan X always performs better than the 980ti even when that's not true in other games we test applying overclock puts the 980ti reference and 980ti hybrid close to each other in performance but keep in mind that the temperatures are 3x on the overclocked reference cards so even though the performance is pretty much the same which may make it hard to justify the cost the part that matters here is the thermals and over time if you're overclocking any kind of semiconductor GPUs and CB is included they lose some of their lifespans so it's very aggressive on a semiconductors life to overclock it and over volt it especially and that's because you're increasing the heat to the device so that's the core issue and increasing voltage just isn't something that they like a whole lot of so to reduce the heat using AC LC down to 20 Celsius delta T is a pretty big deal and that does mean that you have more overhead for overclocking without the extra concern of potentially killing your device substantially early compared to the reference card which is much hotter we gave the gtx 980ti hybrid our editor's choice and best of bench awards for single GPU graphics card performance the 980ti hybrid comes pretty close to the Titan X they trade blows in a lot of places but the 980ti even this one at 770 dollars is still a lot cheaper than 1,000 to $1,100 Titan X and that makes it a pretty good buy it's also showing that liquid is where the industry is going for high on GPUs this is something that is consistent with Andy's own pushes Andy going with liquid for the fury X and all the other fury cards and even though 390 X in some cases so liquids a big deal and the cooling performance is absolutely noteworthy the gaming performance is it's good it is worth know but it's not nearly it's sort of eclipsed by the cooling performance and then power consumption is basically the same so that's where we are with the 980ti hybrid check out the article in the description below for more information and if you like this type of content check out our patreon page help us out it's pretty cool to see you guys donating and supporting the content and I will see you all next time