Gadgetory

we've been doing these hybrid mods on and videocard since the GTX 1080 launched later with a 1080i we've done work with the 980ti hybrid actual cards from EVGA and generally the takeaway has been that reducing the thermal Headroom limitations often created by the reference coolers even these the non blower ones reducing those limitations significantly improved the clock boosting Headroom which enabled greater performance and a lot of the Adhan board partner models that do better than reference it's because they are better cooled not naturally because they're pre overclocked so today we are doing that again with the 2080 ti that says 2080 we're doing with the 2080 ti there are a lot of cards and pieces right now and seeing what what the limitation is because probably gonna be power this time because NVIDIA has changed things quite a bit for this generation before that this video is brought to you by EVGA SRT X 20 atti XE ultra video card we recently use this to beat our founders edition overclocking results with its additional power target Headroom and cooling capabilities the XE Ultra uses a 2.7 extra thick heatsink for a quiet operation under low loads but also maintains higher clocks on average over the FE model learn more at the link in the description below so we stuck it be quiet to ATC I'll see you on there and we used fans for airflow over the vrm and vram you actually don't need any kind of heatsink on the v RM or the memory modules on these cards in a test bench where you can blast thousands of rpm worth of air at the Bayer modules in a case you should probably have heat sinks or fitting stacks or something because it does get quite hot actually we found that the memory tested and this chart won't be in here but has to just bear with no fans on it at all just just a liquid cooler on the GPU nothing on the memory or the vrm found that the memory was hitting about 90 C which is about spec so obviously we added some fans after that we stuck to on there for the most part 1 on the top exhausting one in front angle intake blasting straight into all the hot components then we had some airflow from the CLC attach the card as well testing today the primary focus is going to be on their own performance versus frequency performance we're using 3d mark and fur mark for that and then we also have some game benchmarks to see if lifting the thermal limitation gives us any additional boosting Headroom that actually benefits us in games typically the answer is is worth doing because typically we get anywhere from 5 to even upwards of 9% and a couple of our past tests with either vago or the Pascal series cards and so that's worth doing a hybrid mod but it's a lot different these days because we're power limited to about 15 amps down the PCIe cables starting strictly with frequency will help best illustrate the performance characteristics of our hybrid mod we'll get two thermals momentarily but first for this test we're using 3d mark firestrike extreme on a frozen frame to render the same data repeatedly with both cards that left completely stock aside from the cooling differences we noted that the hybrid card was able to sustain clocks were on 1920 to 1930 5 megahertz with a flatline more or less from start to finish plus or minus 15 the fact that there is no immediate drop-off at the start of the test illustrates that there's a frequency benefit from a cooler core the stock card meanwhile air-cooled experienced frequency decay from 1940 micro Hertz down to around 1775 megahertz where it's at for the rest of the test the total difference in clocks is about 160 megahertz which may as well be an overclock at this point that's a lot of frequency loss to thermals and NVIDIA steps its frequency curve based upon temperature starting as low as the 40s or 50s Celsius and scaling up to 63 degrees sorry 9 degrees 84 degrees 87 degrees and so on where you drop some frequency each step of the way better coolers will sustain higher clocks it doesn't have to be a liquid cooler either but it would be tough to beat the GPU core thermals that we managed here well look if those in a moment before the thermals though here's what it looks like when we add an overclocked line to the chart we were able to sustain a highly stable 2130 megahertz clock once we found stability you'll see a few crashes in there from when we were finding the limits the all-time peak was 2175 megahertz and then we stabilized for a little while at 20 145 but the application crashed shortly thereafter firm stable frequency of 21 30 megahertz was possible in fire strike with the new cooling solution that's a major jump over the air-cooled card but whether or not it gets leveraged in games will heavily lean on when the power limits are encountered let's look next at the same test as the previous two charts except this time from the perspective of thermal results on the GPU die only we can look at vrm and vram temperatures next note that for this chart we heavily controlled ambient temperature and monitored it every second data is presented with a constant ambient temperature the air cooled card sits at a near constant 75 degrees Celsius plus or minus 2 degrees the hybrid managed a 42 degree constant temperature with occasional fluctuations also plus or minus to see the overclocked variant pushed to 45 degrees but stop there and is very impressive in its thermal positioning and for individual component temperatures on the next chart we saw the GPU core dropped to 18 degrees delta T over ambient again that is over ambient which was about 22 degrees Celsius during this testing the vrm temperature averaged for our hybrid mod and fir mark was 60 point 8 degrees over ambient with the memory temperature at 40 point 8 degrees also over ambient these temperatures were achieved entirely with just a ton of air cooling we had two fans pointed directly at the VR m and V RAM during this test illustrating that heat sinks are actually not necessary with sufficient airflow we'd still advise heat sinks especially inside of a case but they are not wholly necessary in the right environment the stock air cooled card averaged a 52 degree over ambient core temperature and 50 degree vrm temperature also over ambient with memory at 58 degrees Celsius over ambient F 1 2018 is up now this game uses Codemasters ego engine and is useful for a heavily GPU intensive title it's also our only racing game representation at 4k the hybrid mod 102 FPS average managing a lead barely outside of error margins when put against the air-cooled founders edition the difference is about three percent it's entirely limited by power at this point we're pegged to 15 amps down the PCIe cables for both the air cooled and liquid cooled versions of the card overclocking gives us some extra room but results in a tie with the air-cooled overclock this limitation is resultant of power limitations again we can only really circumvent that with shunt mods or something similar at this point like higher-end board partner cards with a bigger power limit but Nvidia still restricts that to some extent just in case you were wondering 1440p is the same situation hybrid mod pushes about 4% faster frame rate than the 2080 TI f e not impressive for the amount of work involved and ultimately a power limitation once again we're stuck at 15 amps down the PCIe cables not counting what's drawn through the PCIe slot we recently praised Sniper Elite 4 for its impressive scalability from the team's in-house asura engine and proper dx12 implementation unfortunately it also posts 0 meaningful scaling showing hard power limits and killing all hope for thermal differences triggering meaningful clock boosts that actually impact performance far cry 5 is next this one uses the dunia engine and is commonly GPU bottlenecks particularly at higher resolutions the game is also running a representation of a DX 11 title at 4k the r-tx 2080 TI fe operates at 74 FPS average with the hybrid model evan t 6 FPS average we see zero scaling when both are over clocks have plus 200 megahertz core and plus 850 memory the scaling has vanished as we've bumped against a hard power limitation 1440p posts the same thing we're hitting power limits more than thermal limits despite the stock hybrid card outperforming the stock air-cooled card by 2.7 percent overclocking both ends up fully limited by power shadow of the Tomb Raider is the last one will bother showing this is a modified crystal engine game on DX 12 we have other games benchmarked as well like GTA ashes but results scaling is identical between these and all of the others it'd be boring to show 20 minutes of charts that are power limited suffice to say the hybrid model helps marginally for this generations reference card we simply need more power as for Tomb Raider though at 4k the numbers are nearly identical for both stock hybrid and air-cooled cards and the overclocked variants alike no meaningful change from thermal advantage so there's your answer completely not worth it even a water block for everyone who is like oh why not just use a water block well that wouldn't matter either because the temperatures gonna be about the same in fact temperature for what we did is probably lower because we're not sinking the heat of the vrm and vrm as well it's just the GPU so it doesn't matter it doesn't matter what block you use because I mean if you're just going for silence that's one thing but if you're going for maximum overclocking Headroom it's irrelevant there's a massive power limitation which is interesting because the PCB that goes to these cards the ti especially it's the best PCB that Nvidia is done on a consumer card that I can remember it can take a lot of power they've capped it where it doesn't need to be capped where it is the PCB the vrm can take it the GPU can take it so we're not exactly sure why they did it perhaps maybe the GPU does start to have problems in terms of longevity we don't know exactly how the process ages or how the how this particular GPU and architecture age is under different thermal and voltage conditions but the vrm for sure can handle it and it just says overclockers even it kills the card we'd like to have the ability to push more power into it anyway but that's kind of beside the point so yeah not worth it water block if you're doing it because you know you'd like water cooling or you like the silence that liquid provides sure those are completely valid reasons but it's not really a great idea to do liquid cooling specifically to get additional overclocking or boosting Headroom because you're not gonna get any so not worth it there the biggest limitations power there are reference PCBs from EVGA like the XC ultra that have a v bios version that lets you get an extra seven percent power or so but that's not that much and liquid cooling it's not gonna get you anything really significantly better anyway now there are thermal steps for frequency at something like the there's one at 63 degrees one at 79 83 or 487 and so forth so lower temperature does help a bit but just not enough because you're constantly hitting the power limitation all the time so biggest problem here is power limit not a hundred percent sure why and video said it where they did will try and ask them and maybe find out most likely their excuse is that it's probably for longevity of the card maybe for health of the die something like that which would be valid if true we just don't have a good way to validate that and finally if you do have a custom board and we have some like the Asus ones we got MSI's in we have some others so if you have custom boards that allow more power throughput then yeah those would be better liquid cooling candidates but the cooler some those are already pretty good anyway so we'll be looking at those more in the future but the next thing to do with the hybrid card that we built is probably just short the shunts and see if shorting the shunt resistors gets us any additional power Headroom it should but probably not a lot so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow cameras Nexus helps that directly go to store dock cameras axis dotnet to pick up a mod mat like this one one of our shirts or one of our teardown crystals like we have back here and I'll see you all next time