Gadgetory

the EVGA RTX 20 atti kingpin card is AJ's crowning engineering achievement for this generation as always the KP cards aren't necessarily meant for people who well they aren't meant for people who just want a card and don't have any personal or enthusiast interest in overclocking or playing around with it and in addition to this review tomorrow's video will have us gaming with liquid nitrogen on this card so we're extreme overclocking but actually doing gaming benchmarks through our standard suite you'll want to check back for that especially if you're one of the people who says liquid nitrogen overclocking this point list you can't play games with it because we're proving you wrong this is a card for people who really want to get low level with hardware and into the weeds and today we're testing it as it was meant to be tested our review looks at the kingpin card for quality under liquid nitrogen but also looks at normal use cases like straight out of the box performance thermals and power performance and overclocked gaming performance with the stock water loops but again also Alan to this card allows users to completely remove the power limit from Nvidia architecture the bane of our existence and we're looking to see if it's worth it and for whom it might be worth it before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly and their high-end thermal compounds thermal grizzly makes cryo not paste for high thermal performance and conductivity without being electrically conductive so you don't have to worry about shorting components cryo knot is particularly good for replacing stock GPU pastes as cryo knot is a non curing compound learn more at the link in the description below we've done a lot of coverage of this card it's currently coated in Vaseline for overclocking stop it so the the card we previously looked at we did a teardown of it you can check that separately but we'll talk a bit about here we did the builds Ord coverage of its PCB and vrm quality and they're very high it's a well-built card but it's extremely expensive and that means that most people will probably look at it and scoff at the price and that's fine because it's it's really not meant for average use it's not meant for someone who would buy a 20 80 TI fe or XC ultra or something like that this is meant for overclockers for enthusiasts and although it can be overclocked without alan - of course it excels with alan - or exotic cooling but the lack of power limits the added tools for voltage control do give you some additional power with just the stock cooler which is a 240 millimeter CLC at $1,900 this is one of the most expensive video cards on the market you have the Titan r-tx above it and then we're not counting things like quadros so tight r-tx is about 2500 this however is capable of outperforming the Titan r-tx even without L&T in gaming workloads now it's still a lot of money so yeah it's cheaper but you're talking $1,900 and the improvements versus a stock XE ultra or something might not really be worth it to you but that's because it's not meant to be used that way so the way this card is really properly used is by playing around with it and what you can do with this one that you can't do with a lot of the other cards is things like add the xoc bios you can completely eliminate the Nvidia power limit and even if you're not doing an exotic cooling you can still take the CLC which is a 240 millimeter a Sutekh CLC and we can show that and be roll a bit and that comes with a cold plate on it that's a bit modified so it's got a protruded cold plate we'll talk about that more later but it's a flatter service it works better with GPUs that are exposed die rather than an IHS which has a slight curvature to it so that's beneficial for cooling and that it's got this larger vrm fan Adhan as well so if you care about stock performance you can overclock it pretty damn high and we'll go through those numbers with the stock cooler on it you can also run the noise levels fairly low with an overclock that's pretty high and that's because of the 240 CLC large fan on the vrm and then there are icx sensors if you want to look at things like the thermals of memory of the VRM frankly it's not that important to look at those because they'll be under control so it's not like you can really do anything with the information but it's cool to look at and they do use NTC thermistors for those which we've previously validated to be accurate to the real world so it's not like it's some BS marketing those are actually the temperatures it's just that what you can do with that information under stock use it's pretty limited it's just cool to know hence being an enthusiast card you're paying for features that are just interesting not necessarily practical and that's fine there are practical features too though and the power limits one of them but being able to effectively get an extreme overclocking card out of the box that having to do any hard mods yourself is the real value add of an EXO seat card whether that's Galax or whether that's something like the KP card and this is something that often gets overlooked and just when users are commenting on these types of products so go back over the basics in the XOC live streams we did we got up to 25 80 megahertz that's really high the stock frequency of something like an XE ultra is under 2,000 mega Hertz and that's a higher-end 20 80 TI as well when you overclock most 28 ET is on the market they tend to stop at around maybe 20 50 megahertz plus or minus about 50 megahertz 20 50 is about where we see the the mean and excursions from that mean are rare and often negative not positive so this card that's with an overclocked by the way this card runs at about 20 40 megahertz out of the box now does that impact your performance a lot not necessarily we'll talk with that in the numbers today but it gives you a higher starting point for overclocking at which point you can sort of springboard to 2526 megahertz and potentially beyond these GPS are also Bend we have footage of an MSI bidding tool that was at one of MSI factories EVGA uses something similar it's not the exactly the same thing to our understanding but EVGA uses a similar tool to take the individual GPUs and we've seen trays and trays of those put it into a socketable tester and then validate the performance if it's a good chip it goes into a KP card if it's not as good of a chip it might go into something like a black condition card where you're not really guaranteed a high clock or maybe an actually ultra if it's kind of good but not XOC good so these are Bend and pre-selected and KP kingpin who's one of the leading overclockers is heavily involved in the process of setting those parameters and and working through the cards in fact a lot of these were pre tested by kingpin especially the early ones or at least the ones that went out to some of the media so let's get into the numbers we'll talk about how the overclocking works go through our OC stepping chart get through the gaming by Marx for fun thermals and power and talk conclusions here's how the kingpin card works the card has three bio switches by default the switches include a regular OC and Ln to be BIOS but even the LNT UV bios isn't really ready for Alan Zoo for that you'll want the XO CV BIOS which is made available on X devs dot-com X Deb's is run by ten one of the two evil geniuses behind the kingpin card and has an incredible guide about how the card works even if you don't want to buy the card but you're just interested in learning about hardware this is an excellent starting point to learn some more about how GPUs work the guide is honestly one of the most in-depth we've seen on the Internet the XO CV bio says password protected the password is again I promise not to RMA this card indicating exactly why it's not on the card by default as for the V BIOS differences the regular V bios runs a hybrid fan speed range of 0 to 48% running quieter with vrm fan speed at 22 53% you just don't need more with that v bios and there's a table on tin site that has this information the fan stops under idle load whereas OC and ellen to be buy us options never stop the fan and run higher speeds power limit is still 360 watts on all of them and the power target is 144 percent max on all of them there's no thermal protection on the Ellen 2 switch but the others have it the XOC b bios gets rid of the power target it's just 100 percent all the time all of that said you'll still run into n V V DD o CP or the GPU core voltage over current protection which can be forced off with EB J's classified tool the classified tool is what we used during our XOC stream to tune the voltages for the card and it makes available NV v DD which is effectively v core FB VD D which is memory voltage and PEX voltage these can be tuned even without the XO cv bios and NV v DD OCP can be disabled with this tool we have to turn it off when tuning the voltage to the core as we hit the maximum current quickly but the card can still handle more you'll want to keep V Corps under 1.3 volts when not using exotic cooling here's our OC stepping chart the chart is split into peak frequency the average frequency with a given set of settings temperature during the run which will fall between crashes and vvd D power target and more note that the power target is removed with the exo cv bios as there is no power limit in this mode with the regular v bios we found that we were last stable in row 12 at about 21 at 45 megahertz average frequency this is damn good for a starting point but we knew that we could improve it with more work ultimately the regular v bios and talent to be bios don't actually change a whole lot for non xoc overclocking and even well even with it doesn't matter it just doesn't change a lot but we switched anyway to run higher fan speeds and remove some of the protections with the allen 2v bios our final stable result was 21 60 megahertz average frequency we're about 22 20 megahertz peak frequency we tended to bounce between 21 60 and 2205 depending on the workload at any given second the power as measured by gbz read 377 watts but we know this to be somewhat inaccurate so you can mostly ignore that column well instead refer you to our power tests later in the video we found that NV VDD was actually limiting us more than it was helping so we set it back to auto and ran 10 80 millivolts the reason for this is because the voltage begins to pull away power from the core after all wattage is equal to volts times current and increasing the voltage to the core will reduce how many watts we have available to actually boost the clock it actually goes negative so you get diminishing returns and the negative returns if you push the voltage too high we also had some black screen issues which we eventually traced back to NV VDD with OCP on so the next step was to use the EXO TV BIOS and then disable OCP although you could do this without the extra cv bios if you wanted for this testing all with the stock cooler we found the max table configuration to be 2200 5 megahertz core and 14 60 megahertz offset on the memory we couldn't get the next step stable and so settled here with a 1.2 NV VDD raising to 1.25 didn't seem to help nor did 1.3 and so our next step was liquid nitrogen will show some live stream clips for this section working with experienced overclocker dosed upon z AKA bearded hardware on youtube we were able to get the card up to a respectable 25 80 megahertz core and offset of 1500 100 megahertz memory we found that the card was difficult to keep stable at minus 130 degrees Celsius and below like below as in below minus 130 not towards zero but that targeting instead minus 120 to minus 124 degrees did the best for our card we all see as minus 1 15 earlier and were able to get pretty high with that but needed the extra 10 degrees to push further note also that this results was after streaming for about 4 hours so you'd do much better if you didn't chicken clock it like we did for entertainment purposes and pushed it hard out of the gate either way we ended up at about 1.4 NV VDD and 1.5 for FB VDD with pecs at one point one one three and we ended up increasing our scores from a baseline by 23% with the overclock to 25 80 megahertz so they're still scaling here at least sometimes by extreme this test is among the most important for the kingpin 20/80 ti as it establishes what the cards resting frequency is when under a heavy workload for most 20 80 TI cards we see variable frequency with a range of about plus or minus 100 megahertz from baseline as a result of either inadequate cooling or a heavily power limited be BIOS well plot the 2080 TI f e frequency first to establish the trend the fe card falls from a peak frequency of about 19 20 megahertz at the start ending closer to 17 70 megahertz went under load the reason behind this is twofold although the GPU isn't hitting it's hard throttle at 87 degrees Celsius it is encountering boost tears all the way up to its resting temperature roughly every 5 degrees Celsius plus or minus a bit will result in a higher boost frequency and so the same card running at 50 degrees would operate at a higher frequency despite potential power limitations the second part of the equation is the power limit where Nvidia Zephie card is becoming bound by how much power it is allowed to pull by the v bios limitation that nvidia set plotting the kingpin card and now we see a perfectly flat line which is what you want to see the card starts at about 20 80 megahertz but as it heats up to its resting temperature it settles at 20 40 megahertz baseline 20 40 megahertz versus the 17 70 megahertz of the FE card is a considerable improvement and is responsible for many of the gains you'll see in today's charts we saw an improvement by sticking our F ecard underwater not shown here but then it became power limited while using as much thermal boosting Headroom as it could plotting temperatures next the KP card heats up to about 50 degrees Celsius and stays there whereas the FE card runs closer to 75 degrees before eventually dropping clocks to rest at 73 degrees Celsius this next chart looks at the kingpin fan response versus temperature curve having a low temperature in itself isn't really all that impressive as any 3000 rpm set of fans can achieve that but doing so with reasonable rpms is the hard part with a 240 millimeter CLC that gets much easier the GP temperature is plotted on the Left axis where we see the card sitting in the range of 50 degrees Celsius the GPU fan spins up from about 600 rpm resting speed to 1,100 rpm went under load for this version of the V bios and the regular fee bios on the card the fans can spin over 2,000 rpm at max speed so for auto settings to maintain 50 degrees Celsius at 1,100 rpm is pretty damn good the vrm fan stays at around 1,000 rpm and hardly moves with regard to its speed as the V R M is over built already to the point of not really needing much cooling under these conditions as for why it cools so well a lot of it has to do with the GPU cold blade on the CL c we previously talked about this in an old EVGA hybrid cooler teardown we did but to recap EVGA is using an ASA tech CLC for the new 20 atti kingpin card with a modified cold plate the cold plate has a protrusion on the bottom to contact the GPU using a flatter surface than can be found in CPU CLC's for a CPU cooler which is what almost all of the CLC's are built for the cold plate is very slightly curved by ASA Tech's supplier to match the curvature of the IHS of a CPU for GPU is because the die is directly exposed without an IHS it's better to make the die to a flat surface which would be the protrusion in the cold plate that helps contact to the GPU and improves thermals as a result for power consumption testing we're looking at total system power at the wall as logs through an ashes of the singularity fork a highly intensive workload although this is total system power we've controlled all of the exposed voltages in the system and use an identical bench each time which allows us to look at the Delta systems a system to get relative accuracy of GPU power the 2880 I can pin system left to its stock configuration and regular V bios ends up pulling about 455 to 470 Watts from the wall during these test drugs the V bios has a power limit of about 360 watch when stock and even that still limits the KP card more than the vrm ever will XO c bios is needed to really push it hard because the ln 2 and the OC bios both have a three sixty watt limit during our live stream when nearing the 25 80 megahertz peak with 1.3 to 1.4 NV v DD core voltage with memory at 1600 megahertz offset we measured a peak power consumption of just the video card not the system at 670 it's a 700 Watts we'll look at this more when we do our next content piece on the KP card but obviously that's a lot of power draw that's more than we're seeing here for the entire system when it's left to stock conditions component temperatures are also stay within reason unsurprisingly when operating stock or with a non XOC overclock we observed stock thermal performance under a torture workload at about 50 to 60 degrees for the memory depending on which module was measured and 37 to 55 degrees for the power components in our original IC x coverage of the SC 2 and f TW 3 1080i cards we validated that evey J's NTC thermistors are accurate and read similar values as our own externally installed probes considering the power components could take up to and over 125 degrees Celsius these readings are all about as good as they can get under a stock cooler like this one an f1 2018 the king pin 20 a DTI stock card runs at 113 FPS average which actually puts it ahead of the stock Titan RT X and roughly tied with our water-cooled 2080 TI fe overclocked at 113 FPS average the 28 e TI KP leads the XE ultra on for 30 point 3 9 by an impressive 7.3 percent and that's with both stock with the KP card overclocked under just the OC bios the card managed to lead the charts at 122 FPS average that puts it ahead of an overclocked Titan r-tx by 2.7 percent and ahead of the XE ultra overclocked 118 FPS average by three point three percent considering we're still talking about a 20 80 TI here not some new GPU that's good scaling and shows the benefit of a higher end card although the value is obviously a tremendously different story and one that we'll talk about more in the conclusion Sniper Elite for at 4k and high settings is next using asynchronous compute in DirectX 12 and this workload the stock kingpin 20 atti again outperforms the Titan RDX once again by about seven point four percent so far we're seeing consistent spacing here the twenty atti kingpin stock cards 120 FPS average also outperforms the stock 20 atti XC ultra by 10.5% overclocked in the XC ultra puts it up to 126 FPS average although it wasn't able to sustain as high of an overclock in Sniper 4 as in the other games the kingpin overclocked pushes it to 131 FPS average but it's 0.1% lows have fallen as a result of an unstable memory overclock we could further fine-tune this although in this instance Sniper Elite 4 is more abusive than other games and we would lose about 1 FPS to 2 FPS average off the top as a result still overall it's pushing further than other cards we've tested here let's look at the frame times to illustrate the instability in our memory overclock just to be clear this is on us not on the card itself as we pushed it to an unstable level with this V bios and this power target available but it's important to show the reason this is important is because it illustrates why frame time testing is necessary see how the gaming experience is to the user if we had only looked at averages the experience would look much better with 131 FPS average number and the frame time dips that caused stutter would be obscured or hidden as they were plotting the kingpin stock card we see overall highly consistent frames of frame intervals with frame times averaging in the eight point five to nine millisecond range this is among the best stock performance we've tested for a single GPU and the high consistency shows that the card isn't pushed to unreasonable limits out of the box plotting the overclocked task for the K P card we begin encountering excursions from the mean frame time upwards of 8 to 10 milliseconds which becomes visible to the player as small stutters or hitches these happen almost in predictable intervals and it appears to be because the memory clock was unstable in Sniper for these spikes are what create the worst 0.1% value at despite the average FPS finally applauding the 28 et ixc Ultra OSI we got an example of a more stable overclock that still encounters occasional hiccups for this one we also had to drop the memory OSI as it was able to hold higher in other games there are no major spikes on this one but it's the result of spending more time fine-tuning for gameplay the KP card ends up with better averages but worse 0.1% low and this could be made equal or better than the XE ultra by spending more time fine-tuning the clocks that said our focus for that was more on XOC with this card so we didn't spend too much time stock tuning shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4k places the kingpin xx atti stock card as outperforming the Titan RT X by about three point two percent considering the Titan RT x cost $2,500 that's not bad although we must fairly state that the Titan RT X is really intended for other workloads with its memory capacity regardless a 28 ETI outperforming to Titan RT acts under stock conditions is a good starting point the 28 ET IX z ultra operates at 71 FPS average with the 28 e TI fe stock card at 68 FPS average once we overclock the K P card to its maximum at stable offset with the stock OC v bios the card ends up at 82 FPS average surpassing the Titan RT x overclocked 78 FPS average by 4.2 percent and out matching the 28 ET IX e old Trent and EFI overclocked results by 3.3 percent and so on the XO cv BIOS and over volting it would give you a bit more room but you have to be careful of cooling requirements our 0.1% lows dip here as a result of an imperfect overclock the memory is bordering on stable and throwing occasional errors which results in the dip further fine-tuning can eliminate this issue once again although the average frame rate is about as good as it'll get without the XO cv bios so we tested other games than those but you get the idea you can stop there culprits an improvement on average over the 28 ET i overclocked cards it's actually better on average than a titan r-tx full stock some games this might not be true it depends how much they care about the additional cores versus the additional frequency and frequency does play a big role so as you can see with things like 1660 verse 16 60 TI overclocked enriched 2070 or 2060 overclocking where you start bumpy making 2060 towards 2070 with just higher frequency it matters a lot so is it worth it well frankly and honestly for a lot of people the answer is no and EVGA is also pretty comfortable with with stating this because this is not a card that I mean probably a lot of people do this but it's really not the sort of thing you're supposed to just buy put in the system and never work with again it's there's there's too much effort that goes into the PCB vrm quality is too good the overclocking guides are extremely good the ones written by ten from ex devs from EVGA really but it's too good that stuff to not take advantage of it so if you are planning to plug the card in and then maybe you think you'll just slide the power target to 144 and never do anything else we Don assay skip this card save the money and buy something else but if you have an interest even a beginner interest in overclocking it's something you should consider this is something that you would want to purchase for actually you know working with getting hands on with and the classified tool is good to tune the voltages if you've never done that before read the ex devs guide and be careful because you can start killing things there's a reason the XO CV BIOS is password protected with a password that is I promise not to RMA my card but yeah this this is clearly not something for the dailies as Vince likes to call them although you could certainly buy it for that point you would be overspending and it's honestly not worth it if that's who you are but overclocking this as an enthusiast who's worked with a lot of these video cards it was genuinely more fun than the average 20 80 TI and that's because with the average 20 80 TI or any other 20 series card it gets once you've done like 20 of them which is probably about what we're up to you start to realize they're all about the same they all stop at the same place it's about 20 50 maybe 20 115 megahertz if you're kind of on the higher end and it's the same steps to do it takes 15 minutes once you're experienced with it and then that's it that's that's what the card can do you're done unless you can get a custom v bios and the KP card gives you more room so with the liquid cooler with the XOC bios we pushed up towards about 2200 megahertz oh then we start becoming power limited you can increase the voltage at that point but then you'll probably hit OCP but you can use the classified tool and turn that off you should run a level 0 LLC if you want to run on the high end but you can obviously decrease that a bit if you want lower LLC for you know it was concerned about stability but you can turn off OCP you're still gonna hit a power limit so then the next step is install the XO CB bios read the guide be careful not to go too crazy on the temperature of the voltage because you can damage things easily and it would be your fault at that point but you can install the XO cv bios and not even under xoc conditions you can still push it further so this is something that gives you some room to play without allen - it's it's it gets it's a really high-end beginner approach if you wanted to do that but once you feel confident and comfortable with overclocking the card you can start pushing exotic cooling dry ice reality or something like that anyway the card is a lot of fun to work with for overclocking it's more exciting or interesting than the other xx ATT eyes with the CLC on it and that's because you genuinely can get more out of it and it also allows you some more dials to play with which as an enthusiast is exciting because we're used to Nvidia stuff being completely locked down a lot of that's on NVIDIA EVGA with these cards and some of the other competitors with similar cards like galaxy Hall of Fame they can start working around some of those limitations in a way that you really can't with a mainstream card so that's that's the the right audience for this it's someone who is gets a lot of fun and entertainment out of playing around with these things and you maybe feel like Torian has been a bit of a letdown thus far this breaks those rules because it doesn't it doesn't have to follow them so that's your ticket out but it's an expensive ticket we would say the price is fair for the hardware you get and it's fair for the performance you can get if you're into competitive benchmarking overclocking or if you're into enthusiasts just kind of tweaking around with the hardware obviously fair and worth it will depend on you and what you're doing the price is fair insofar as the hardware it's worth it if you're doing all the things I just described and it's not worth it if you're just gonna plug a card in and then put a solid panel on the case and never look at it again so that's our Kayden pin twenty atti review this is a really difficult thing to review because it's really complex if you want to learn more watch our PCB and vrm analysis by builds why he goes into incredible depth on the card we also have a tear down on the channel separately that will give you over an hour of content on this and then if you really want some more after that we've got an ex OC overclocking recap from our livestream that talks about the steps we went through to get to about 2600 megahertz and if you want still more than that we've got a four Herald livestream archive so have fun but that that should give you a pretty start to finish look at the card and we're happy that this was the first product we've done a review on that had XOC data in it so cane pin thanks for setting it over and Joe thanks for not destroying it because I know you really really wanted to so that's it for this one links below for the article and additional information subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow directly or stored I came in as exes net if you would like to pick up one of our mod mats we'll see you all next time