Gadgetory

we're back to test the new 1080 TI amp extreme to see if ZOTAC has redeemed themselves with this new card this card is one of the biggest on the market taking nearly three slots cooling with three fans and using the biggest heatsink we've yet seen on a 1080 Ti the unit is also priced at roughly 750 to $770 and so you think that'd be pretty good at cooling but we'll see how that goes throughout the testing this testing will be largely focused on thermals and noise because again all the 1080p eyes really have about the same gaming performance before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by our patreon supporters you can help out by going to patreon.com/scishow more Nexis and checking out the pledge rewards and options or you can go to store docking Razak to scott net to pick up a shirt and again thank you to our readers who occasionally send us loaner hardware for review so here it is the zotac 1080 TI amp extreme again want to be largest that we've reviewed the only one that comes closer is more or less equal to it is that the gigabyte card that we have here the extreme Oris card they're about the same width the zotac card is longer its heavier and is competitive in terms of slot requirements which is almost three at this point so it's a big card and all that space is really allocated to this aluminum heatsink it's a large heatsink will measure the thermals and things like that in a moment and then the rest being the shroud as far as the external areas of the card go is a three fan cooler and these are synchronously controlled it's not a synchronous fan control they have six heat pipes underneath with five of them protruding out of the right side of the card facing it and then one of them routes through the left half of the heatsink for LEDs and effects the card has one in the back plate for the zotac branding which lights up with a digital LED so you can get a more fluid transition color to color and there are also digital LEDs on the top and bottom and then one in the top nameplate and then you've got the geforce gtx branding on the top of the card which is a requirement by nvidia the only people who've gotten around doing this that we've seen is ASIS with their Strix ROG card which actually we have right here because the asu's card has a sticker that you can peel off but it says GeForce GTX on it so I guess they bypass the rules a bit but that's the outside of the detect card in terms of the core specs it's a 1080p eye they're all the same in terms of gaming performance out of box even with pre overclocked so what you're left with is the cooling solution and the noise and then I suppose the power solution for the power solution on this they are using two eight pins for the input and then it's a technically it's a double eight phase-- using a u p9 v one one controller in a phase mode that's doubling and going to basically a sixteen phase format with fourteen of those where the vrm normally is and then the other two phase is in the bottom right of the card kind of under their own heatsink separately speaking of the vrm it's got its own heatsink it's a small aluminum thin stack it is not connected to a base plate so they've done that differently on this card from the others there's no base plate on any part of the card it's just PCB screwed into the heatsink with the separate vrm he's sinking that vrm heatsink has on top of it a rubber bumper pad which is theoretically used for noise damping but is completely pointless because with a card this large and with three fans spinning out the lower rotational speeds that they're spending that you really shouldn't have any vibration and we didn't even when we remove the pad so that's pointless but the rubber bumper could be used to help prevent the thin stack from flexing as much in the event that the user applies undue force during installation which is probably the more likely used since the pad doesn't actually make contact any part of the card when it's left undisturbed that's our photos show the pad does not contact the chokes so isn't used for coil one reduction and instead sits with a hair thickness gap between the vrm heatsink and the padded aluminum heatsink underbelly but that covers the basics of the cooling solution the rest is a copper cold plate from the GPU and then an aluminum cold plates for the vram which sinks into the same aluminum thin stack as everything else let's get into the testing as always you can find the testing methodology in the article link of the description below we are focusing on the thermals and the noise for this one and we're also doing a noise normalised test at 40 DBA for all the cards that we've benchmarked so far with this method where you can look at the thermal results versus the fixed 40 DBA noise output starting with a stock thermals chart we see that the 10 atti at extreme card operates it's GPU temperature reasonably around the 66 Celsius mark and that's when under Auto conditions by the way basically out of box look at 40 DBA testing in a moment but this auto configuration also places the card's power component temperatures in the 90s nearing 100 C with a steady state temperature of 95 Celsius the new RAM is around 81 Celsius steady-state before getting to the comparative charts here's a look at one of our GN EQ charts basically a steady-state to show the thermals under various test conditions overclocked our GPU temperatures remain steady when operating at a fixed rpm so we're soaking the extra 20 percent power and plus 50 megahertz core pretty well and the vram increases by about to see from our plus 400 megahertz PM overclocked not bad the vrm components however are pushing up to 98 Celsius external temperature from the measurement we're taking and that's with a 22 to 23 salties ambience with one 120 millimeter fan providing airflow over the back plate if you put this card in a case it would not be unreasonable to see a 40 Celsius internal ambient temperature which was boost the vrm temperatures into the range of 110 + Celsius now a few reminders here just like with EVGA ACX card this is technically within spec ZOTAC isn't breaking any specifications here it is running hot though and the thin is even though you're technically within spec under 95 Celsius for vram and under 125 maybe 150 Celsius on the BRM depending on which component you're looking at even given that condition it doesn't mean it's okay it's run so hot and the reason is because this card is massive they have all of this area to provide cooling and get rid of the heat that's generated by the components and they can't outperform something that is almost half its size about an inch smaller in terms of just the cooler alone or even the sc2 card the EVGA sc2 card or even the founders edition card the vrm is running hotter on this and no they're not the same vrm components of course that's a big part of it but the thing is though TAC has the ability to correct this it's just a matter of poor design for the thermal solution and will kind of show some of our own tests where we fixed it somewhat with the hack job but just something thermal pads basically and got it working a bit better so yes it's within spec but it's it's not good it's too hot for the expensive price 757 $70 really anything over 700 has no excuse for that kind of performance and even the $700 MSI armor card which by all accounts was an awful card other than the PCB itself the gaming ex PCB was it's one saving grace for h2o it's worse than that card in terms of thermal performance and getting rid of the heat in the power component areas and it's bit warm in the vram but not nearly as bad as with power comparatively to the other cards let's get some perspective looking at other devices on a steady state chart we're now testing for thermals it with noise normalized at 40 DBA output the MOSFET chart positions the zotac app extreme 1080i so significantly hotter than the other cards that it's actually impressive that is it's impressive they've managed to design a heatsink and fan solution so bad at cooling that's was one of the biggest cards on the market this is a three fan cooler that takes nearly 300 PCIe slots and somehow it's managing a 70 mm delta T over ambient power component temperature or nearly a hundred Celsius if you ignore that delta T over ambient bit that makes this card 20 C hotter than the previous worst card on the bench the 1080 TI armor and the 1080i armor uses what is effectively a 1070 cooler though it's a bit buffed looking at 40 DB a VRAM temperatures where we see a 58.3 Celsius delta T over ambient temperature with the 1080 TI armor still worse on this particular charge this place is the app extreme around where the gaming X and F tw3 performed not Prez Oh tack here but then again the vram is cooled directly and actually uses thermal pads to contact cooling plate kind of hard to screw that up it's more of a standard solution in that department for vram so they've done well at keeping that normal performance I guess GPU temperatures at 40 DBA are also somewhat reasonable with the amp extreme at 42 Celsius delta T over ambient this is around where the FT w3 and gigabyte extreme aureus cards performed with the asus strix ROG card still hanging on to the title for best air cooled card we've tested so far the next coolest are both under liquid so then why do we see the high temperatures we see with this card well a lot of it is actually not the fans or the fan rpm a lot of it is in fact the way the cooling solution is handled right now because this is a loner card we have to send it back to its purchaser just a reader like the rest of you or a viewer and so we've done a mod for him where we've replaced the original rubber bumper that's in here on the vrm components with thermal pads and those help a decent amount as we'll see but the reason that the temperatures are so high to begin with is partly because of that rubber bumper that just sits between the large heatsink and the small heatsink with one not actually any contact between them so there's no reason for it to be there and two it should be a thermal pad where just like a CX where EVGA overlooked or whatever you forgot or cheap that on or whatever they did to not put their own pads where they now have them everywhere on the board ZOTAC did not put their own pads here so that's part of the problem the next part of the problem is that ZOTAC is using a backplate that ultimately acts as something of a hotbox or a thermal insulator and it helps trap some of the heat which we've seen in the past on some cards again EVGA ACX comes to mind where when we added the thermal pad to the back of the card between the backplate and the PCB which is something that UGA provided for free to make this problem go away on their own devices this card does not have a thermal pad there so it's got the same kind of problem where it's just trapping he and in some areas that cause of temperatures to spike we actually removed the backplate for some future testing in a moment and and saw an improvement so those are part of the reason that this card is running warm the other just potentially being the power design in general so let's look at the thermal pad that we added on top of the vrm heatsink just to see what the difference looks like we actually had to do this by stacking tooth they're all pads because we didn't have a thick enough unit in stock to actually put on there there's limits performance since you're now transferring between two interfaces which means that our fix so-called isn't even that good but it's still better than what ZOTAC shipped initially and they definitely have access to better they're all pads than we do the difference in power component temperatures is an improvement of 7.1 Celsius moving from roughly ninety four point eight C to eighty seven point seven C using a better thermal pad or just a single thermal pad would improve that further and here's where it really gets interesting if we remove the backplate for the next pass with the original rubber bumper on the BRM heat sinks instead of that thermal pad and with the fan fixed around forty-five percent which is about what the auto would give you for both benchmarks we see that ZOTAC is incinerating its own card with what amounts to a plastic backplate or at least a plastic wrapped back plate but the backplate removed the GPU temperatures remain more or less the same we're at a 2 C difference which is still an improvement but not exciting what is exciting though is that the power component temperatures improve by about 13 C that's 95 to 82 which is completely reasonable for a B or M temperature both are within spec but 82 is alongside what most of the other cards perform at when they are in the 10 atti class so in terms of gaming performance again all the 1080p is are more or less the same once you get a decent one that resolved the potential thermal limitation of something like a founders Edition card where you can boost higher if you have a more controlled GPU core temperature so anything that's got an aftermarket cooler that we've tested and shown to be good the exception being something like another blower cooler like the Aero cards for example once you've gotten into that class a better cooler they really are all the same for gaming performance for overclocking performance they're mostly the same as well the my time you start getting into a difference is when you go kingpin class or lightning class or something like that and you get the extra switches to disable limitations or you get the extra clearance to add Ellen to pots without having to rework the board those are a different class of card and those can certainly push higher more easily in the overclocking department for these cards the by out of box and used cards they were they're about the same so we've kind of ruled out gaming and overclocking performance as a reason to buy one card of the over the other what you're left with is things like price looks if that matters to you we're not really going to comment on that and then thermal and noise performance thermal and noise performance the asus strix is still hands down the best cooled card in terms of noise output at 40 DBA it performs better than everyone else until you get into the liquid class and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon unless we get our hands on some other new advanced cards that we don't have already so the zotac card is not impressive enough to warrant a purchase versus its nearby competition which would be the 750 to 770 dollar class so 770 you look at stuff like ft w3 and asus rog Strix with the Strix kind of leading in that class both of them are a bit superfluous you're not going to get a whole lot better out of them other than really specific lower noise performance if that matters to you then perhaps they are worth considering but then again so is liquid at that point so you look at it so in $50 class you start getting into the territory of an FC to the icx version or some of the gigabyte cards the gaming acts gaming acts and the SE 2 are pretty good in the $750 class they are the gaming acts especially fairly quiet and they cool better at least on the power component temperatures then the zotac card does so it's kind of hard to find a place for this one you can make it better with their own pad mods which we've kind of done and we'll leave it that way and ship it back to Josh with the thumb pad mod on it but you're basically buying for the looks at that point do you like the digital RGB LEDs yes or no there's your answer of if you should buy this card it's not the absolute worst thing that ZOTAC has ever built but it's also not that competitive with other cards on the market given the price and that's all for this one thank you for watching as always you can subscribe for more click the link below for the article go to patreon.com/scishow us out directly and I will see you all next time where you can look at the thermal resort we come see our volcanic lava events at the thermal resort