Gadgetory

ms:i at $750 gtx 980ti gaming ex is one of the most overbuilt cards we've looked at lately particularly for its seemingly excessive thermal solution and use of 16v core vrm dual set packages from fairchild specifically the FPPC at 5:01 8s geez controlled by 8 driver ICS for an eight phase-- BRM with four MOSFETs per phase as builds are noted in our PC breakdown of the card the BRM is capable of sustaining a 250 amp load while outputting just 15 watts of heat at 125 C even 400 amps would keep us to 40 watts of heat thanks to how much the phase design spreads heat over a large service area and high account of that today we're reviewing the MSI 1080i gaming exports thermal and gaming capabilities before that this coverage is brought to you by the Computex conference which runs from May 30th to June 3rd in Taipei Taiwan this year Computex is the biggest event of the year for PC hardware and technology where we preview the newest prototypes before they come to market we highly recommend attending or following this event online for industry professionals and enthusiasts learn more at the link in the description below this generation of GT X 1080 TI cards has gone big we have the gigabyte 1080i Xtreme to review next already here and that's multiple slots and then this one is fat - it's got not just the normal twin frozer cooling design on it with the dual axial 100 millimeter blades but it also has a much fatter thin stack and denser array of those fins so the fin density is greater the fin count therefore is greater and it's also spread across the entire card with partitioned base plates that we'll talk about momentarily so it's a big card and that means it can deal with a lot of heat even though the 1080i doesn't necessarily output that much even compared to a 1080 yes it's more yes the power throughput can be quite high if you really push the thin but this is a whole lot of cooling potential so we'll see how useful that actually is and how it compares to the EFI model and to our hybrid model in this review and then the next review we'll look at the gaming extreme card from gigabyte MSI ships the 1080 TI gaming X this card at $750 with 3 configurable OC profiles through there software and those include the usual OSI profile the gaming mode profile and the silent profile and respectively those o'clock at 1683 megahertz boost with 1569 megahertz base for the OC profile gaming mode runs ten megahertz through twelve bit lower net 16:57 megahertz boost and 15 44 megahertz a base so a bit lower and then silent 1582 and 1480 boost and base our DB LEDs are present on the card if that's your thing but we're more interested in the cooling solution we already have a PCB breakdown and a teardown of this card in separate videos though to quickly recap we're looking at dual 100 milliliter axial fans as the set up atop the aluminum fin stack that covers the entire card the heatsink terminates in two cold plates one connects the heat pipes and the left half of the card to the GPU and the other connects the FETs and the driver IC to the thin stack via thermal pads the inductors contact the fins via a thermal pad and not dissimilar from the update EVGA did to its FTW series last year and the rest is mostly open airflow the left side of the base plate contacts the vram module directly which then contact heat pipes this we think is a noteworthy decision by MSI cooling vram with an independent base plate and contact the main heatsink is still uncommon and something we saw explored last year with EVGA FTW hybrid card via the copper vram cooling plate that connected to the CLC and gigabytes extreme water cards there's potentially an increase to GPU core temperature readings by nature of saturating the cooling interface and the cold plate with more heat from neighboring components but it's not usually a significant increase and the decrease in temperatures on the vram is noteworthy and a more valuable trade-off an extra couple degrees on the GPU time the back of the card is enshrouded by a backplate though no direct contact is made between the backplate in the back of the PCB which means it's less for cooling and more for structural support on this card that we will have temperature readings without the backplate in the article link in the description below and also in the article below we'll have a few things one the methodology for testing as well as a few more charts so there's a couple extra thermal charts and a couple extra resolution game tests charts in the article and secondarily a couple of other notes on the testing methods first of all these thermocouples that are mounted to the card are pretty good they are the pad that is adhesive and connects to the card is one one hundredths of an inch thick it is laser thin and is designed and engineered specifically so that doesn't really interfere with temperature reading so that's worth noting these are built for this task that's what they do these thermocouples the resolution is about 0.1 to C and the response time is about 0.15 seconds on the thermocouples used here and then we have more information on the chemical composition of the actual adhesive pad if you really care about it in the article below everything else is defined there as well including the drivers used for the testing the settings of the games although the charts will contains all that and then the CPU the memory all that stuff is in the article but let's roll on to the thermal test first and then look at some of the FPS starting with BRM temperatures strictly compared against the 1080 TI foundered edition card we see in this chart that both the gaming x and 1080 TI f e it lands their vr m component temperatures and PCB dioxide temperatures at about the same place the FETs are well under any actually concerning threshold which you wouldn't start hitting until something like 125 plus celsius anyway with the 1080 TI f e card landing just under 70 c4 FET seven represented by the orange line or right around 65 c4 Fett to represented by the red line so those would be the feds one up from the bottom and about dead center on each of these cards the gaming X meanwhile shows its fats both shades of blue at 72 71 Celsius for fat 7 and 65 to 74 fat to keep in mind of these packages has multiple sets for highside and low-side and so they are quite dense and our PCB analysis and vrm breakdown video has more information on that if you are curious moving now to a chart that plots frequency and core temperature versus time we get a chart that's fairly complex and will be staged a few lines at a time so it's basically three frames of this chart for the first stage we're looking at the clock rate of the GTX 1080p I found edition ie reference card versus its temperature now that the clock is enumerated from a power virus scenario which means that it is lower than you'd see in a real game but the heat load is significantly higher especially on the vrm and that's what we care about here for this test the clock is a bit spiky we have a range of about a hundred megahertz at times caused by continually reaching the 84c threshold limiter and dropping clocks to maintain that temperature the spikes in frequency often align with spikes in temperature for this reason as they have an inverse relationship let's now add the GN hybrid card here which is just an Fe board with an EVGA CLC added to it here we see the hybrid card run the GPU temp at nearly 45 see where the FE card operated around 84 Celsius prior to our mod this could be resolved of course with a higher fan speed but that's not really the point of today's content and we already talked about that in our hybrid results video if we look at the hybrids clock rates though we can see that it is less spiky than the clock of the reference cooler version and this gives us the extra 4 to 9 percent performance in games that we saw in our previous test depending on the hive o'clock intensive they are again that's an hour hybrid deep dive but now let's add the gaming X charts getting dense here but this is the last iteration of it the gaming X is pre overclocked hence the higher frequency and it is also the flattest frequency line we have the hybrid card removed the thermal constraints that's flattening the line but immediately ran into power and voltage budget constraints by limitations on the card itself the gaming X will have those at some point as well of course they all do especially with Nvidia's limitations but they're pushed back enough to help further flatten the curve and then the pre OC boosted a bit in the frequency Department partly thanks to the massive erm while keeping GPU temps with a 50% fan speeds at around 68 Celsius this is higher than the hybrid mod and lower than the reference board which is really all we need we're well below the thermal limiter point on the clock and the clock is smoother overall this means we should expect a generally higher frame rate or at least better frame times on the gaming X than the hybrid but we'll see how that performs in games granted the FET temperatures aren't really any different from the 1080i hybrid or the EFI will at least have some char showing how this all plays out in a moment moving on to game tests you find the rest of thermals in the article below we're including overclocked numbers in some of our 4k or 1440p tests the table on the screen now shows the overclocked step in ultimately we have the step down to seventy-five megahertz from a 100 megahertz core off set and 400 megahertz memory offset to retain stability and all games tested so while we were able to push 100 megahertz core and 5 50 megahertz memory in fire strike those were not stable in all the games there's not a significant amount of overclocking Headroom over the stock card and you'll see how that plays out in the games tested starting with Ghost Recon at 4k the msi 1080i gaming ex places at 58 FPS average with lows at 51 and 47 this lands with 1080i gaming X right around where our 1080i hybrid mod performed this makes sense given that the hybrid modern is the thermal limit of the EFI card and provided an additional 5 to 6% of clock Headroom prio see compared to the 1080i reference card we're looking at a gain of about four point nine percent on the GX over the F II card the Gaming Act didn't overclock in any meaningful way and landed at 60fps versus 58 for a change of about 3.4 percent we can have frame time plots there's no meaningful advantage from overclocking the gaming X there's simply not enough Headroom on our units when considering its stock shipping frequency in fact the 1080i F II it modded with the hybrid cooler allows for overclocking that effectively equals the gaming accent framerate went under overclocked looking at 1440p Ghost Recon wildlands at the 1080i gaming X lens at 94 FPS average under stock conditions with lows at 81 and 78 this is effectively equivalent to our stock hybrid mod with the lead over the reference cooler about three percent this is again because we're not encountering a thermal budget limitation on either the gaming X or the DIY hybrid cards overclocked in the MSI GTX 1080 TI gaming acts a mouthful gets it up to 97 FPS average for a gain of 3.2 percent of the stock gaming X this is led by the hybrid that we overclocked though not in a big way running at 1080p we see the hierarchy remains mostly the same as gtx 980ti gaming X performs at around 120 FPS average ahead of the reference 1080i in both F pS average and the frame times it's roughly tied with the hybrid stock card gains from overclocking are largely insignificant again and introduce additional frame time variants as the card struggles to maintain even a smallest 75 my cards offset you can see an hour frame time plots on the screen now that despite higher average FPS and more frame throughput overall consistency goes down with the overclock which begs the question of how much it's really worth it with for honor at 4k the MSI GTX 1080i gaming axe performs places above the reference card by about 9% in average FPS with lows mostly comparable the 1080i hybrid sits between the gaming X and reference 1080i card for honor has routinely shown issues with frame time stability when overclocked as illustrated by the 1080i hybrido see in these charts we encountered the same problems with the gaming X and decided that user experience was better with a marginally lower average fps in trade for actually consistent frame times ie overclocking isn't worth it in this game at 1440p the story remains the same Emma size gaming X performs around 138 average with lows at 117 and 102 putting a head of our hybrid stock mod by barely 1% the lead over the reverence card is more noteworthy at around six point six percent frame timescale somewhat linearly here and that remains true with 1080p where not much has changed the 1080i gaming X is just ahead of our stock hybrid mod operating that 204 FPS vs. 202 FPS this lands the gaming ax at about six point three percent ahead of the reference gtx 980ti running a 192 FPS average using a Vulcan on doom at 4k the GTX 1080 TI GX pushes 98.7 FPS average with lows at 81 1% and 78 FPS 0.1% lows this leads the GTX 1080i hybrid mod was to stock clocks which performs on 95 FPS average with our 1% low and a 0.1% low metrics at 78 and 25 the 1080i reference card meanwhile is closer to 90 making for a performance lead in the gaming x over the fe card of about 10% or about 4% over the hybrid model with no OC overclocking helps the gaming 2x push past 100 FPS up to 103 with one 0.1% lo metric that 84 and 81 for dumat 1440p and 1080p check the article below cyber elite 4 with DirectX 12 and async places the gaming X at the top of the current chart where it runs an 86 FPS average lows around 70 FPS against the 1080i stock cards 84 average it's not a huge or significant lead but one that makes sense given the thermal and stock clock advantages of the msi card and nothing too exciting overall though finally Mass Effect Andromeda posts the 1080i gaming act at 69 FPS average with one percent lows at fifty-six and hour 0.1% low metric at 53 this is ahead of the 1080i hybrid mod p OC by about 5.6 percent and behind the overclocked 1080 TI GX marginally overclocking the gaming ax card once again shows very little significance at 1440p we see similar results the 1080i gaming X places at the top of the chart ahead of a 1080i G on a hybrid card it was time by about 5 percent that's roughly the same as the 4k Delta check the website for synthetic tests and ashes of the singularity we've got fire striking times by there as well so overclocking on this card is really not exciting we have our PCB and vrm analysis on the channel already and in that analysis build Zoid shows where the shunts are that you can short on this card if you'd like to try and use liquid metal to get a bit more out of the power and voltage budget but short of doing that don't expect anything special with overclocking it comes pretty much pushed to where it's going to be and when overclocking is useful the gains are marginal at best it's maybe 3 to 4 percent if you get more than that it's a very clock intensive game certainly it's possible but in our testing with our unit and obviously they very gp2 GPU overclocking is not exciting on the card it's pretty much they're out of the box so that's good news for someone who wants to buy a card that's already at the limit and doesn't want to touch it in terms of overclocking if you're trying to buy it install it and never touch it again it's not bad in terms of the clock rate if you want something to play with really sadly Pascal is not going to get that for you in most cases anyway especially at the high end where the running clocks as close as they can limit point to begin with so that's just the Pascal thing now this car being prio seat as height as it as it is does mean that you have more limitations in terms of where you can go as an overclocker in terms of headroom but that's just the way the game is with these types of cards in this architecture the $700 cards like the 1080 TI OSI model from gigabyte and the 1080 t is C model from EVGA which that one's about 720 I think those are appealing they have an interesting price bracket in that 750 for this gets you in terms of thermals a well-built card in terms of build quality well-built card in terms of clock something that's pushed to the limit but it's $750 and a 1080i OC or 1080i FC will get you pretty close to the same clock rate if you are willing to put a few minutes into overclocking and that's just again how Pascal is they all stop around the same point in terms of OC potential so that means that you could buy a cheaper 700 or 720 dollar card and get roughly the same performance you might be plus or minus 3% but if you're also plus or minus 32 $50 it just becomes a question of is that 3% worth it to you that's something only you can really answer for your use case but something to consider if 750 sounds a bit cheap keep in mind the $700 options this time around are really not bad as long as it cooled well the FE card has a damn good PC D and a well-designed vrm unfortunately it has a cooler that for our audience most the time is not a great solution you could get any axial fan cooling solution and not run into GPU limitations while maintaining a lower noise output whereas the EPI card sure you can avoid thermal limitations if you're willing to sacrifice some of the noise Department so that means that things that are based on the reference PCB this time aren't bad you don't need a custom PCB to have a good card with a 1080i if they're built on reference and have a better cooler cool grab it because if you can spend five minutes overclocking you look at performance it's about the same anyway but we'll be looking at more of these soon the the extreme gaming version from gigabyte is on the bench all has been tested a bit mengapa not entirely to keep an eye out for that thermals here are good designs good it just becomes a value question at 7.50 given all of those Pascal considerations and finally if you're curious about any of our testing methods the article explains them we also have a video on what 1% lows and 0.1% lows are which is methodology that we defined for the frame time testing metrics when we instituted those a while ago so you'd find that on the challenges type in what are 1% lows and then we've got our patreon page patreon.com/lenguin exit on that for the website store like cameras nexus not not to buy shirts like these thank you for watching subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you