Gadgetory

what's going on everyone Jase she says here and it's been a while since I've gotten to do any sort of graphics card review because we're kind of deep into the lifecycle what's currently out so I was super excited when EVGA told me they're launching a new graphics card so I have to go turn tricks on the corner to get my fix anymore but I digress that's a conversation for another video but we got a chance to go to the EVGA headquarters and check out the new for the win two gtx 1080 which is featuring their new icx cooler I say icx cooler but trust me when I say there's a lot more to this than meets the eye it is not just a cooler we're going to talk about that today now last week I had the opportunity of going in a behind-the-scenes tour EVGA s headquarters where they showed us like the RMA Center the testing center the packaging I got to hang out with some of my friends like Paul and Kyle and Steven with gamers Nexus and we all got to get really hands-on with this so trust me when I say that there's a lot of information here I apologize if there's too much information in the video where it's too long I'll try and condense it so make sure you guys check out their coverage too because it's always good to get multiple perspectives on a single topic after all we all know I don't know what the hell I'm talking about now on the surface the icx cooler in the ACX cooler are very difficult to distinguish but trust me when I say it's what's underneath that is really different here now we're going to talk about three things here about this major design we're going to talk about the new cooler we're going to talk about the PCB and we're also going to talk about software I'm not going to be doing any game benchmarks on this it's still a 1080 it's still going to have the very same performance as you saw before although maybe a little bit less throttling so we're not going to doing any game benchmarks today I'm focusing simply on a teardown and temperatures now the heats in array found on the icx actually has these holes drilled all the way through it which allow air to kind of escape through the heatsink going sideways as well as moving air through it so it's supposed to get a little bit more efficient cooling capability it's also a little bit more efficient airflow and trust me when I say that you can indeed feel the air coming off the back of the card especially when it's under load more so than I could with the back of this card which is completely solid and blocked off air can't really get out besides very well at all underneath the heatsink is also a very different design when it comes to the base plate the vrm is definitely a forethought when it comes to cooling because now you have these sort of heat spires we'll call them it's not really a heatsink but they're definitely heat spires they're designed to pull heat through the plate get it up into the airflow and give you better vrm cooling now EBG a solution to the thermal issue was by putting heat pads between the heatsink and the top of the base plate which doesn t touch to vrm it's just it didn't have anything on top of the base plate to dissipate the heat so the thermal pads though did increase the cooling efficiency quite a bit but the problem is the heat sink that it's touching is not flat on the bottom it's it's pointy so there's a lot less surface area that could have been there in the first place so what EVGA did on the icx cooler was a sort of bent the fins to make them a little bit flat so where it actually touches the thermal pad is giving you much more efficient transfer of heat now also to the heatsink that's directly on top of the GPU the bottom of that was completely flat and closed off well now they actually have 50% of airflow that can actually travel through that and get down to the base plate as well which gives you much better cooling for the memory so it's quite a bit different on the heatsink although it looks very similar on the surface now moving on to the back of the graphics card you can see the original backplate was a very nice piece of machined aluminum it had some vents where it mattered but again where the back of the VRMs were was also a vent it didn't have the greatest contact in mind when it came to the backside of the power delivery now remember heat radiates in multiple directions not just one direction so heat coming off the back of the card was also an afterthought so what they've done is they actually created a bit of a heatsink built into the backplate which is separate down the middle so you don't you don't get as much heat contamination from the GPU side of things moving over to the vrm side so obviously it's working with that very defined limitation of heat transfer from the vrm now before I talk about temperatures let's talk about my testing methodology I use an open air test bench because I want the only factor on the temperature of the graphics card to be the cooler itself there's no way I could put any case on here that's going to account for all real-world scenarios so right now the only factor on what the temperatures are on the graphics card are what the limitations of the cooler itself are so I'm not going to address any of the open air test bench comments in this video you guys can go and check out this one up here I actually tested open air test bench versus a closed case with the same GPU to see what the differences are you can have the conversation over there if you want it now on the flipside having an open air test bench actually makes neck of results when it comes to things like back plate testing and seeing this new back plate design is going to be efficient because there is zero air flow happening over the back plate there's no case fans moving air usually your case fans are blowing directly on your GPU especially we have a side case fan so that was something to keep in mind so I did do testing without any airflow and then I also tested what they stand on there to see what the differences would be so now with all of that out of the way let's talk about how well this design really works now with the new precision X you can actually monitor power delivery GPU temperature and memory temperature so you have full control over what's going on your system you can actually set temperature indicators where you can change the color of those LEDs to kind of tell you what's going on at a glance if you can see your graphics cards through your window if you don't want those on just set the color to black and they won't even be there now idle we were seeing power delivery temperatures sitting in the mid 30s perfectly acceptable it's where I would expect it to be but once I put it under load we saw temperatures go up into the low 70s which sounds like a lot the MOSFETs are typically rated up to something like 120 C so we are well below that threshold that's because obviously now we have cooling on both the back plate and the front plate that's giving us active cooling to the V RMS it's doing a fantastic job I also use my thermal imaging camera for this test because the matte black backplate was perfect emissivity for this test and I was surprised to see that we actually were within one or two degrees of the temperatures that were being shown for the GPU on precision precision OC if I was I wasn't expecting that so I was kind of happy that made me go yeah the thermal testing is actually worth doing but also got me thinking in cases like I mentioned earlier typically there's air flow that moves over the back plate so how well is that going to work so I took a thousand rpm fractal design spam put it about the distance away a case the front case that would be and had it blow air towards the GPU it's not a huge stream of air it's a thousand rpm fan it does not it's not a high CSF and it's just a steady light breeze on the back of it and check this out temperatures actually came down to where they matched what was actually showing on precision XOC so that was very good one it sort of validated the temperature sensors and saying yes this is legit temperature and - it made the use of the FLIR just completely valid so I was happy about that so I think that makes all the emissivity gurus out there satisfied at least I would hope so but Jay I like to overclock my graphics cards what's going to happen if I do that well guys I got good news because fortunately there's a separate fan curve for VRMs as well which will override any fan curve you have going on for the GPU because guess what the fans are separate the right fan on top of the power delivery is independent from the left fan and it will do its own thing based on vrm temperature and the left and can be set directly to GPU now if you want to link them together you can but I think it's really neat that you have a system that overrides it and says hey once we hit 74 see on the vrm let's start speeding up the fans a little bit to keep things as cool as possible and the temperatures that you saw right here were all with the factory curve I didn't change anything and you can see that we had temperatures that were very very respectable so even when I applied a 2088 overclock I wasn't seeing any additional temperature on the vrm simply because of the fact that the fans are speeding up to kind of counteract that the EVGA tells me they have a temperature target of 74 C on the BRM that can't be changed that's a safety thing they've determined that number so that's where it's going to be but I also was curious with an overclock and setting the fans on something manual like 60% fan speed sacrificing a little bit of noise the temperatures on the vrm came all the way down to the low 60s absolutely amazing the design is clearly working now speaking of safety some of the photos of the burned PCBs on the AC X fiasco scared EVGA enough to where they actually added a fuse to the PCB that will blow before anything else catches fire or burns so that's a good I think all manufacturers should do that anything that's got power going through it might finish it up some sort of built-in fuse including me I blow my fuses all the time so as you can see it's quite a bit more than just a new cooler it's software it is a cooler and as well some PCB changes and nine sensors to keep an eye on what's going on inside of your system now at the EVGA press day we did have some questions we asked you Vijay directly well what if you're out of the step-up program or what if you've already got a for the wind card and you want to step up but you're outside of that window are you just leaving the old owners out to dry well know that what they're doing right now and you have to get more information on their website I don't have any of the details but what they've told us at least be a messaging is that there's going to be a $99 step up program to be able to upgrade to a four that when to if you want it now will say this I've got three of these for the wind cards thermal pads applied I have no problem using it in fact I put one inside a friend system if you guys remember that I have full confidence in the a CX 3.0 with the thermal pads applied to it it's just good to see that EVGA responded to the public outcry about something needing to be done about the design a company that doesn't listen to its customers is not going to be a company for long so kudos to EVGA on that one I think more companies should actually follow suit and listen whether their customers have to say Apple but who needs to listen to your customers when you have courage anyway guys time to go thanks for watching today's video again make sure you check out the other coverages out there there was quite a few of us at the press days so chances are your favorite outlet has probably covered something regarding icx - make sure you check them out guys as always thanks for watching tell me what you want me to test moving forward the Terry Crews build guys it's coming I promise the last bits of pieces I was waiting on are finally here it's coming I just don't want to devote too much I want to be a surprise for the guy so stop nagging me alright time to go thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one