Gadgetory

the EVGA GTX 1080 FTW hybrid this card right here so far has had the most interesting a i/o solution for video card that we've yet tested and that includes the MSI Seahawk / Corsair hydrographics for the most part but the gigabyte extreme water forest card which is right here is the GTX 1080 extreme with no e water force that cards been waiting on the sidelines we have not been able to get one because despite having a working relationship for gigabyte for several years they don't send us review samples of video cards thankfully one of our viewers Sean did send over the card for review so thank you Sean for the card and let's get into it the gigabyte GT X 1080 extreme water force as seen through its front window uses a similar approach to GPU and GPU component cooling as EVGA does EVGA solution used a copper plate atop the vram which you can see in our b-roll and that then connected via Tim or thermal interface to the CLC cold plate this allowed the GPU CLC to be used for syncing the heat of both the GPU and the V Ram modules and that meant that EVGA is GPU CLC shares the solution and runs an increased GPU diode temperature than what's found on the simpler GPU only solution of the Seahawk or hydro graphics card which is not cool the vram 4 gigabytes card a similar idea is deployed for vram module cooling and that's then expanded and refined to include the vrm this is done by extending a heat pipe from the copper vram plate to the aluminum vrm heatsink and the two are soldered to each other and then piping all the heat out of the metal with the liquid cooler and it's cold plate a hole in the service of the vram cooling plate allows a GPU cold plate protrusion to access the GPU directly this improves the GPU diode performance the readout with direct contact and higher density of copper in the cold plate the GPU cold plates partial isolation from the vram cold plate also improves the temperature performance the cooler master may be doing something with their liquid flow within the CLC that furthers this temperature and we can't take it apart because it's a loner one thing's for certain the GPU block is wide than some of ASA tech solutions that are purpose-built to cool silicon and this makes cooler masters larger service area copperplate fairly capable of handling all the heat from the vram vrm and GPU and we'll show those thermal benchmarks in a moment pe T tubing is used on the cooler making it more rigid and similar to a bendy straw in its movement and PE T tubing if you don't know has an inner coating along the plastic that helps insulate the coolant but that coating can be cracked if the tubes are bent too much which increases permeation and liquid loss this is the only downside really of most coolers of PE T tubing these days this is contrary to the other common tubing material a low permeation rubber use for the EVGA and seahawk coolers by ASA tech let's get into the thermal benchmarks for the gigabyte GT X 1080 extreme water force card for this particular review we're reducing the FPS charts shown in the video so you'll have to check the article link to the description below if you want more FPS charts because ultimately the performance between all these 1080s is pretty much the same so the point here is we're expanding the thermal and the noise sections of the review looking at average temperature during peak load the gigabyte 1080 extreme water force card manages to run at about 25 point 1 7 C delta T over ambiens with an idol of 3.39 see that places gigabyte solution between the corsair and msi Seahawk which is the same thing at 18 point 5 C and the EVGA 1080 FTW at twenty nine point six one C's was right in the middle pump rpm likely plays a role in this and the fan choice also plays a big role as we explored in the GT X 1080 hybrid versus Seahawk content voltage also just as an aside does have some impact and gigabytes card runs at a higher voltage than the EVGA S at 1.5 volts and EVGA s runs at a higher voltage than Corsairs gigabytes clock rate is also higher which leads us to believe that the cooler master solution is likely running that higher pump rpm already discussed and that it better isolates the GP portion of the cold plate and potentially that the fan has some impact on temperature performance too in this case the gigabyte fan may be a little bit better but there's a lot of variables with this gigabyte card because of just how much it's actually cooling the VRM is the biggest difference let's look at the temperature overtime charge this is the same data as we just saw just plot it against the time on the x-axis the point of this chart is to show the ramp-up time of the cooler as you can see they're all pretty much the same at least these days looking at our endurance charts is a little more interesting though and it shows what you're seeing on the screen it now this endurance chart shows the gigabytes 1080 extreme water forest cards performance over a two hour endurance run as we've seen with numerous and video GPUs this generation the card is clock dropping several times after the 80 minute area of testing clock drops fall to about two thirty five megahertz with this card in particular and normally lasts for one second during some GPU boost functionality and variance in one instance though we had a thirty second period of reduced clock rates that caused a visual freeze in our Metro last light loop and this is something that we're exploring within this architecture still Nvidia believes that the one-second drops are part of normal boost 3.0 functionality and as GPU boost will find any possible times reduce its clock rate in favor of power and thermals that might be correct but we're still researching if the card thinks it can get away with such a reduction it'll do it and try and reduce some of the power draw over a longer gaming session as long as the card thinks so to speak that it won't impact the FPS but we have a lot more research to do on this part of the new architecture in the meantime what we can see is generally comparable performance to the other cards except with a nearly perfectly flat clock rate and the gigabyte solution that's what you want so on the screen you should be able to see at least two of the other cards the EVGA hybrid and the MSI Seahawk or Corsair hydrographic same thing and looking at these at versus the gigabyte unit we've got a testament to gigabytes thermal and power solutions GPU boost is able to sustain its high clock rate of about twenty twelve megahertz for the entire test and that's because thermal isn't an issue and voltage runs at one point oh five volts perfectly flat for the entire time for the most part and in this regard the card outperforms its other liquid-cooled competition just in terms of a flatter clock rate this Seahawk x and EVGA FTW cards have far spiky or clock rates not terrible on EB J's for the most part when you're actually playing games but it does show up in benchmarks and it does impact the lo metrics after a certain point of testing now looking at noise levels you can find our methodology for noise testing on the website we only do a DB output test right now with an a filter there is no frequency spectrum analysis because it's just frankly out of scope for the site there are other folks who are better equipped for that but we can do the basics and what we've learned from testing is that the msi Seahawk / corsair hydrographics is generally either slightly quieter than the EVGA hybrid or basically tied in the case of the radiator fan at 30% and 50% the EVGA hybrid and msi seahawk are about the same decibel level output and when moving to 100% fan speed we can see that there's a bit of a gap that develops but there's a large gap with the gigabyte water force card and that's because their fan runs at a higher rpm maximally it's over 3,000 rpm actually on the radiator fan and that's partly because at gigabyte are actually mostly because gigabyte is cooling their entire PRM vram and GPU solution with just one fan not with a separate blower fan like these other cards have always levels overall are acceptable generally because of the performance of all these coolers you could actually run them all at a 30% fan speed and be fine for temperatures you'd be below most if not all air coolers depending on what you're comparing against and you'll basically never hit 100% fan speed for the gigabyte card because it's just it doesn't need that much cooling it's way more cooling that it's necessary the card generally sits around 30% and for comparison this is where it's a bit interesting the Seahawk and the EVGA card will generally hit around 50% max for sort of the depend on what you're looking at the view on blower fan or if you want to get similar temperature results to us you'd be at either 100% fan speed or 50% fan speed and the only deciding factor there is how you can figure at EVGA s fan plugs into their board and Corsairs goes into the motherboard so you can figure the motherboard obviously as you see fit for fans be generally fifty or a hundred percent is where you'll be that would make the gigabyte card at thirty percent about the same volume as the EVGA and the MSI cards to that and noise isn't a huge deciding factor unless you're looking at really specific scenarios like 100 percent fan speed or if you're trying to run some extreme overclock for long periods of burn and time with a poorly ventilated case starting with the FPS tests again more of them in the article link of the description below doom at 1440p ultra positions the gigabyte extreme water force card just above the EVGA solution for OpenGL tests with gigabyte at 120 7.7 FPS average and identical 1% and 0.1% lows to the EVGA FTW hybrid which runs at 120 4.3 FPS average the two cards are for the most part identical in OpenGL performance for doom and this remains true when we switch over to Vulcan positioning the cards within reasonable boost variants of one another when considering current doom Vulcan and NVIDIA performance limitations at 1080p ultra the cards are effectively identical and Vulcan performance the 0.1 FPS is within variants and can be ignored as equal and just for clarity that's not 0.1% lows it's 0.1 FPS difference between the two OpenGL performance is also mostly the same with the two barely trading of lows and averages and in 1% lows so there's no significant difference between these cards in this benchmark 4k high settings and Mirror's Edge catalyst position the gigabyte card marginally ahead of the tide EVGA hybrid and MSI Seahawk cards with 52 FPS average on 42.7 fps 1% lows all three liquid-cooled GTX 1080s and the MSI twin frozen air-cooled 1080 are performing more or less identically 1440p also shows this with a 95 FPS average across the board for the three liquid-cooled cards and the one twin frozer air-cooled card as with the previous two charts were seeing basically identical performance on the GTX at 1080 extreme water forest card as with the hybrid from EVGA and the hydro graphics from Corsair an MSI all around 59 FPS average and 45 to 47 fps one percent lows nothing exciting with these FPS benchmarks but that's what you expect when testing three cards are the same a GPU in this case GP 104 - 400 let's move on to overclocking for other charts on fps check the article in the description below here's our overclocked stepping table for the gigabyte 1080 extreme water force card we were able to achieve a maximum stable clock rate of 2100 5 megahertz which peaked at 21 51.5 megahertz on occasion memory overclocking landed us at an effective clock rate of 11 gigahertz aided by a huge power target allowance by the gigabyte solution the card was most stable with no real voltage offset and went at a 100 megahertz core offset and 400 megahertz memory offset combined our own 1080 founders edition hybrid - custom mod that we built months ago at this point it's still the best overclock we tested from this generation but all the board partner cards seem to be pretty lucky if you're able to achieve a 2100 megahertz clock rate with overclocking on the AME partner cards as shown in other OC stepping tables the EVGA card managed a higher stable overclock at 2150 1.5 mega Hertz with a peak of 21 64 MSI seahawk maxed out at a 20 50 megahertz stable core clock with peaks at 21 26 in our tests the card runs a reference board though and is more simplistic in its power and thermal design the EVGA and gigabyte solutions are far more advanced in that both of them cool at least via Ram and gigabyte is cooling the vrm as well they also both use aftermarket PCBs that are higher quality than the reference design from Nvidia the gigabyte water force card this one was bought at 770 dollars on new idea by Shaun our viewer who loaned it to us in theory the MSRP is maybe a bit lower than that but 770 is what he was able to buy it for I've not been able to find it in stock since we started looking at it but that makes it the most expensive 1080 we've looked at yet other than I suppose the Seahawk ek card which we haven't reviewed but we tore down is a pretty expensive solution we might talk about that more later in terms of the actual cards you can buy off shelf and use without an open-loop cooler this one is the most expensive 7-7 the EVGA zhou runs about 7:30 for the price and then the msi Seahawk and corsair hydro graphics card is seven hundred and fifty dollars so it's twenty more than the EVGA hybrid which we already kind of covered in the hybrid versus Seahawk review where basically the conclusion was this is a much better buy for the most part unless coarser name as I drop their price closer to seven hundred dollars far more reasonable for reference board with a less intricately designed cooler but that doesn't change the fact of this thin seven seventy so we're forty dollars over the EVGA hybrid with the gigabyte solution the gigabyte solution does run a slightly cooler core temp it cools the vrm better in theory that we don't really have a good way to measure vrm temps through software it would have to be done by drilling a hole into a cold plate and planting a thermocouple in there or something like that certainly not going to do that but in theory this cools its power design components better than the EVGA card the EVGA card is well within acceptable range for overclocked and overclocked slightly better in fact then the gigabyte extreme water force card but to some extent that is silicon lottery to use kind of the buzz phrase it's just manufacturing differences in general these cards for Pascal are pretty hit and miss with overclocking as evidenced by the high over clocks on some of the founders Edition cards like our apparently golden sample card that we ought to 2164 with a liquid cooling mod so as it stands right now EB J's Hybrid is tough to beat for the price at the seven hundred thirty dollar range its performance is good they perform basically the same with FPS they perform pretty close with cooling gigabyte does have a better more sophisticated solution and one that I hope EVGA might consider for their next series of video cards whatever that may be so in terms of just the thermal solution this is pretty interesting and pretty cool from a design standpoint not just a thermal standpoint but as a buyer I would kind of push you towards the EVGA solution because it's more affordable ideally even this drops closer to seven hundred seven thirty is kind of poor the price comfort zone I guess a little bit but 770 is pretty high up there or 750 whatever it may be so that's what you have to think about basically price the noise charts all that and additional FPS charts are in the article below if you want more information to try and make your decision ultimately they're both good cards and they're just expensive so it's it's down to price and that's up to you to decide more on if it's worth it for your build thank you watching as always 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