Gadgetory

hey guys Bill Boyd here and today we're going to be taking a look at the msi gtx 1080 TI lightning so this is MSI's sort of competitor to the EVGA kingpin or the Galax Holub same 1080 t eyes so this thing is meant for extreme overclocking for you know running on ln2 it's not I don't think it's pushed as far as say the kingpin in terms of actual ln2 specific feature set or even the hall-of-fame I'd argue the hall-of-fame problem actually has an even stronger vrm than this but this is definitely the highest end card that msi is making and certainly not you know compared to most 1080 TI's it is quite a lot of PCV compared to most of the other ones before that this is brought to you by EVGA s at CLC 280 liquid cooler 4 CPUs which we previously benchmarked and found to be a high performer given its relative silence the temperature output learn more about this $140 cooler at the link in the description below so before we get into the vrm however I'd like to address one minor problem I have with this card and that's these 3 8 pin power connectors and the fact that they're completely unnecessary there's just no way on earth that a 1080 Ti even with liquid nitrogen is going to pull 900 watts of power well actually 972 watts of power and some of you might be like wait a minute how are you getting to that number aren't these connectors rated for 150 watts well that's the ATX spec for these yes their respect for 150 watt by the PCIe and ATX stuff but the company that actually makes these which is molex and these are mini junior connectors from molex these are rated for 9 amps per pin pair so 3 is so each of these 8 pins has 3 12 volt lines three ground lines there's two other lines in there which don't actually transfer power they're for detecting if you've logged in a 6 pin or an 8 pin or if you've even plugged in a connector at all so there's a bit of safety built into 2 or like the 2 of those pins are basically just safety checks they're not actually used for power transmission but you do have three grounds and 312 volts and that leaves the power connector capable of delivering 324 watts at 12 volts if you have 18 gauge wiring coming from your PSU because actually it's a limitation of the 18 gauge wires that sets the power look like the the maximum power that these connectors can do because you can get these connect like on a 16 gauge wiring these will handle as high as 13 amps per pin pair so yeah but most power supplies are 18 gauge wired so 324 watts is the limit you'll usually that's like workable for most applications because power supplies with 16 gauge wiring are pretty rare like I don't have one so and I buy high in power supplies so I you know if I got the card I'd still be limited to that 324 watt figure so with three of these the card can do 972 Watts and it really really really doesn't need to have that many power connectors I mean even if it was only to eight pins it would still have a 375 watt power limit by ATX spec and that is still pretty high for a 1080p ah'd like for overclocking and such you'd be fine and then if you raise the power limit beyond that is still like the connectors not going to complain you're just violating the ATX pack which happens to be really really really conservative about what these connectors can and can't do so basically this whole 3/8 pin thing it doesn't actually do anything for the overclocking capabilities of the card it's a really easy marketing stunt to make think people go whoa this card has three eight pins it has to be great at overclocking because it's got so many power connectors which really just isn't the case you're not even going to use you know half the cape of power capability of the what like of two of these because actually the card at stock the stock Parliament on one of these is apparently around 320 watts so on stock you're not even going to use half of two of these eight pins much less all three of them so it's completely just a marketing stunt it's not even remotely practical for this card to have this many a pin power connectors so I'm not really a fan of that because it's it's just silly to do this anyway let's get on to things that are also kind of silly but I'd argue us so because they're also kind of Awesome like the 14 phase V core of erm located right over here so we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 inductors and then we have 14 power stages behind those and we also have seven doublers because you can't actually buy a fourteen phase voltage controller you can the max you can buy as an eight phase-- so here you have this chip right here which that is an international rectifier ir35 95 that's an eight phase-- controller in here it's running in seven phase mode and support switching frequencies from 200 kilohertz up to 2 megahertz note that you would actually run at that 2 megahertz frequency because that would just send vrm efficiency down like vrm power efficiency down the drain while giving you absolutely no benefit in terms of voltage stability or something like that well it would but it wouldn't be a measurable improvement it wouldn't like it wouldn't improve overclocking whatsoever so yeah it's not going to run that high also the card doesn't actually give you access to the switching frequency of the voltage controller so you can't change that anyway Emma sighs probably shipping the card with 600 kilohertz coming out of the actual voltage controller just because once that goes through the doublers which are international rectifier I are $35.99 so these are doublers and or quadruple errs they're really really basically just cuts the signal like they just take the 600 kilohertz signal and split it in half so you get 300 kilohertz to your two phases hooked up to one of those doublers which is normal that's how all doublers work it does not include any kind of fancy phase current balancing features or anything like that not that that is super necessary when this vrm is never really going to have any significant amount of current going through any one of the phases just because of the ridiculous phase count that MSI is running here so you know I don't have any complaints for the control scheme and I'm assuming that 600 kilohertz to 300 600 kilohertz and 300 kilohertz actual phase frequency because the International rectifier power stages that MSI is using are optimized to run best at 300 kilohertz they're specifically designed to get best efficiency at around 300 kilohertz you can get a little bit more if you go below that but it's not like it's not worth the trade-off whereas going above that sends and sends the efficients you really really like the efficiency gets really bad really quick if you go beyond 300 kilohertz and you don't really get any major benefits either so I'm going to assume that the code runs among 300 kilohertz and the power stage is in question or international rectifier ir35 55 so these are 60 amp power stages these are not the best 60 amp power stages that international rectifier makes the best ones would be the IR 35 75 s which also come with a partial metal casing which basically improves heat dissipation from the MOSFETs and lowers the internal operating temperature but the 35 55 like this is basically the second in line for best power stage that international rectifier makes and the end result is that theoretically you could run a maximum current through this vrm and to the core of 840 amps because you know each phase can do 60 amps thanks to the power stages and then you have 14 phases so that gives you a hundred and forty amps and that would be doable if it weren't for the fact that an international rectifier 3555 pushing 60 amps of current produces about 12.5 watts of heat so with fourteen of them that works out to around 175 watts of heat and you can't actually hit that current level because the vrm would quite literally cook itself like it would produce at that point it produces more heat than most high-end CPUs unless you start overclocking in which case obviously CPUs can get hotter than that so that's not really a practical rating for actual current draws that a 1080 TI might get through the vrm this vrm actually gets really good efficiency for example 200 amps which is slightly below what a stock 1080 TI normally pulls this vrm will produce about 18 watts of heat and that is for the limited 0.9 volts that Nvidia locks all their cards to so you know 18 watts of heat on the vrm pushing that voltage 200 amps and that 300 kilohertz figure from before if you start going up so like 250 amps which this card will probably hit this current figure on its own just because it has a higher stock power limit at this point it will produce about 21 watts of heat if you overclock it manually further the vrm should put out about 24 point 5 which is still like this is really really efficient which is not surprising because this is a ridiculous erm like 14 phases of 60 amp hour stages is really really good it doesn't really get better than this except maybe 16 phases of 60 amp hour stages and then technically you can also build 20 phase 24 and 28 and 32 phase designs except those are really rare because they're also really really huge and impractical so as far as practical vrm designs goes this is about as good as it gets and it really shows because at 300 amps this is putting out very very little heat as you keep going higher and higher so let's say you somehow hit 400 amps I don't think you can actually do that even with liquid nitrogen that 400 amp figure you'll sort of pop out between 300 and 400 average the card may peak beyond that you know burst current draw can go beyond that but on average if these are rated for continuous so you'll peak between 300 and 400 amps on liquid nitrogen even so really this erm is ridiculous overkill because 400 amps the vrm will still only put out about 35 watts of heat which is still completely cool about if you get the vrm some airflow and it has an adequate heat sink so that's really nice and just for the sake of it if you did manage to push 500 amps through this vrm main your issue being I don't think at 1080 TI even on liquid nitrogen pushing about 2.6 gigahertz let's say 1 point 6 volts core won't actually pull 500 amps it won't pull that much current so if you did somehow ever get a 1080 TI to pull 500 amps then it would still only produce about 52 watts of heat which this is starting to be problematic you know 52 watts of heat that's not insignificant but it's still very very cool about given enough air flow and and beginning of heat sink so that's not too bad in fact it's absolutely great because really the only other vrm that even well know there's only one VRM on 1080 t is that is actually better than this one and that's the one found on the galaxy all of fame card which is a 16 phase also made up of international rectifier 3555 so you basically get to more power to more phases of what you already have here so really this vrm design is just ridiculous overkill on for a 1080i like yeah it's ridiculous overkill for a 1080 TI but this is a flagship and you know it's unnecessary yes but even on liquid nitrogen it's unnecessary but ultimately it really really isn't a you know it's not like it's not I don't have a problem as much of a problem with this as I have with the 318 because this serves no practical purpose here you can kind of argue that well now you can but I'm somehow prefer I somehow prefer the 1450 RM to the 3 8 pins because this like and now I can't justify but it is a really really nice erm even if it's completely overkill for a 1080 TI anyway let's move on to something else that's completely overkill as well the memory vrm which is a 3-phase located right over here and controlled by this chip right over there that chip is a international rectifier ir35 7-0 running in three-phase mode this is a chip that does three plus two phase output so the plus two part is not running it also does the 200 kilohertz to two megahertz switching frequency range it's pretty much the same series of chip so similar specs on these the MOSFETs here are dual end fats from Ubik semiconductor these are qm 38 16 n MOSFETs these aren't particularly great you would there then again memory VRMs really don't need amazing MOSFETs on the other hand either but these are kind of slow they're not super efficient but with three of you know with three phases worth of these the memory vrm is capable of putting out 30 amps of current all only producing about 5 watts of heat so that is you know plenty for the gddr5 X memory chips that the card comes with so again I have no complaints here the three-phase memory is actually memory power is also on par with what you'd see like on the Kingston which is also three-phase memory power or the Galax Hall Hall of Fame which is also three-phase memory power and this does actually can like get you a couple more mega hurt megahertz out of memory when like really really hammering it but the thing is it's like I'd say even even a two-phase shouldn't have a problem what single phase memory do power designs certainly like yeah you can go up from there like to phase designs do have an advantage over single phase but three phase over two phase on memory the difference isn't generally that massive so though I'm not complaining here like yeah this is just fine it is certainly fitting of a card that has the lightning Nate you know the Lightning name on it and has a 14-page Bihar m4 recore on a card that rely on a GPU core that really really doesn't need it so and this is definitely a nice enough memory of erm and let's start moving on to all the minor VRMs around the card like this one right here that one right well you can't see most of this one it's on the back of the card but but there is another rearm here so this right here that this would be the basically the vrm that powers that erm and also that vrm because well basically this would be variable gate drive you won't actually you don't you shouldn't have control over this msi only really gives you over voltage control for the four other voltages that I'll cover later but basically this is power refers of the RMS to run on and it should be set to seven volts because that's where the international rectifier 3555 hits peak efficiency so yeah that's that's what that is it might be set to five volts but it's probably set to seven because that is IR stuff is optimized to run on seven volts best and the QM 38:16 certainly won't complain about running on seven volts either as those can go all the way up to 15 volts gate drive so now that's that that VRM vrm exists it doesn't really affect overclocking because ultimately it just affects the efficiency and running capabilities of the v corps and the memory drm this vrm down here is the one volt pecks or PLL valve erm whichever you prefer to call it this power is part of the some of the PC as well it powers the PCIe connection of the GPU and it also powers the sum of the internal P eles of the GPU core which is why it's called pax / PLL this voltage is very very useful on liquid nitrogen it makes a huge amount of difference having this voltage under control when overclocking on liquid nitrogen I've done a little bit of overclocking with Pascal and liquid nitrogen I didn't actually bother to modify my pecs rail but from what tin from EVGA said whoo 10 is a power engineer who works with kingpin on the kingpin cards he said that this rail is absolutely necessary if you want to like having voltage control for pax is absolutely necessary if you want to exceed 2.5 gigahertz on liquid nitrogen on air cooling and water cooling I imagine it does very little if absolute if nothing at all as that is typical of Pascal cards meet you know changing weak or doesn't really do much changing pax doesn't really do much changing the memory voltage well I'm not sure about gddr5 X I imagine it might scale a little bit with memory voltage but I'm not sure so yeah not not sure about that one either and last vrm we have on here is this VR I'm right here this is the one point volts this is for some of the internal PLL with the GPU core as well as VPP for all of the gddr5 X chips this is basically a little supporting voltage it doesn't really affect overclocking much at all even own liquid nitrogen it doesn't really make much of a difference now one of the cool things with this card is that it is kind of targeted at extreme overclockers so you do get the usual core voltage control well you know it's not really control in my opinion because it's just that slider that goes plus 100 and then it still now ends up being 1.0 9 volts because in video said so but you do get control some limited control over the 1.8 volt rail the PEX PLL rail the V chord well Ecore you have everywhere and the memory voltage you do get software controller Oh software control over all of these I am just not sure how far it goes and how well implemented it is because I do not have the card in hand to check that so yeah but there is a square voltage control for those though I imagine they do and most of them shouldn't do anything if you're on air cooling or water cooling and if you're on liquid nitrogen I'm not sure if they're like if the range on them is high enough I imagine it might not be just because the core voltage is still limited to one point oh nine volts even on this cut like like every MS I've gone ahead and like giving you some voltage control over everything else and it's like the V core is still stuck at the useless low voltage limit so yeah there was an attempt at getting voltage control that's not for sure and I guess it does mean that if you found some I guess there must be some kind of like non public access like tool for this card that is not accessible to the general public that gives you higher voltage controls because MSI has done that in the past with previous lightning cards there is such a thing known as afterburner extreme you've probably never heard of it because you probably shouldn't have heard of it afterburner extreme is a special version of afterburner that the only way to get that was to basically message an MSI representative and and ask for it then sign an NDA agreement and then then you got the program and the reason why this program existed was it gave you a lot more voltage control all unsay cards like the GTX 580 lightning 480 lightning six 970 lightning all sort of the older lightning cards afterburner extreme was absolutely necessary for those to be fully controllable so I imagine there's a similar situation with this card because NVIDIA has been pretty strict about not allowing the general public to have proper voltage control on their GPUs because apparently it breaks GPUs which I guess is true like that yeah that's true but it's my freaking card oh if I want to break it I should be allowed to but yeah ultimately I'm not sure how well the voltage control is implemented there's probably a non-public tool that gives like extreme overclockers like I could probably ask for it and get it and get proper voltage control but for most people I think it's like if you're buying this card for air cooling or water cooling I'm going to say that the extra voltage controls probably don't do anything and they're mostly a marketing gimmick if you get if you want to run the card on ln2 you'll need to get your hands on a extended limited version of afterburner or something which might be a pain as well other than that it also features for Ellen to overclockers 3 voltage Reed points right here which is kind of cool so you can check memory voltage core voltage and the I assume this voltage down here because that's the important one even though I'm pretty sure this one's accessible as well it might be gate drive I'm not sure about that again I need to see the software for the card myself but you do get a voltage measuring capabilities for 3 different voltages memory GPU and the PLL and this is really really nice for extreme overclockers because you can basically monitor the voltage of the card while running a benchmark using a digital multimeter which is also more consistent because sometimes software just gives you really really weird readouts depending on what you're doing so that's a nice feature to have and then up here you do get a to a while switch with an ln2 biles on it I have no idea if that ln2 BIOS is actually implemented properly I'm guessing it probably isn't just because like like most cards that ship with an Ellen 2 ballast it's like like well I've never used a previous lightening so I can't compare to that but most of the time the lm-2 biases aren't like you know I imagine this lifts the power limit and that kind of thing but I doubt it gives you more voltage range or well Nvidia cards don't have cold slow issues you don't actually need a special balls to remove that I kind of doubt it does anything more than lift the power limit which to be completely honest I think is kind of sad for a BIOS called the Ln two bottles but yeah that's the card the PCB is certainly nice the implementation of the features on it I have no idea I kind of suspect they're kind of watered down so that they're except like so that the card can be sold to the general public without people accidentally blowing up their cards by shoving one point four volts through the core while on air cooling or water cooling but ultimately yeah the PCB is really nice the three eight pins are kind of stupid most of the features on this are completely useless for the average day-to-day user for extreme overclockers it really depends on how well they're implemented but the stuff is here it is all available it's just a case of does it work properly so this is definitely a card I'd love to try out in person like get around to get a chance to mess around with it because in theory if everything is implemented properly on this it should be exactly like the kingpin where you buy the card insulate the card and run it on ln2 because you may notice that that was one thing I pointed out on the kingpin is this entire area of the GPU is again clear of anything too tall to clear an ln2 pot except maybe this connector I think some ellentube Potts might not clear that that might be an issue but at least the vcore vrm and all the capacitors are kept well away from the GPU core so this could basically like this could be a really good like this could be really close to the kingpin in terms of overclocking capabilities or it could be really bad depending on how well the voltage controls are implemented and the ln2 balls works so yeah that's it for this video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below please consider supporting gamers Nexus and videos like this by donating to the gamers Nexus patreon and if you would like to see more videos like this and other overclocking related videos you could head over to my channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I basically do more overclocking stuff that's it for this video thank you for watching and see you next time you