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Do small cases hurt GPU Performance?

2018-02-20
what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and remember this PC I built a couple weeks ago a little form-factor 1800 X build just for fun the speed build how fast could I build it yeah plenty of you guys were faster whatever I digress guys we're gonna see what happens when you take a small form-factor PC like this put a radiator on the front which a lot of people think is a no-no and then put a big powerful graphics card in there that's almost touching the mid plate and see what happens with temperatures wet stock speeds overclock speeds we're gonna block off some airflow and see what happens and then we're gonna put in a Founders card and compare I think things are improving now in terms of case design to where you can actually get away with this and not be stuck with these you know standard loud blower coolers so for the sake of science we're gonna test all this today cooler masters new master keys m'kay 750 mechanical gaming keyboard features a minimalistic distraction-free design Cherry MX floating key caps magnetic removable wrist rest USB type-c in an on-the-fly system with no software making it easier for you to game smarter and not harder to learn more check out the links in the description below now obviously we want to put as much heat into the graphics card as we can for this test if I put it on 1080p medium settings the graphics cards never gonna be fully loaded and the test results will be skewed so what we've done right here we've got a 35 inch 34 40 by 1440 P 100 Hertz panel that is running heaven benchmark with eight times MSAA we've also got tessellation on extreme and the ultra preset I've also got my overlay here so you could see what the temperatures are we've had this test running now for about 20 minutes and it looks like our results have settled on 7dc now the ambient temperature in this room right now is about 69 degrees Fahrenheit so it's fairly cold in here so that's something to keep in mind as the temperatures of your ambient you know room temps increase this would increase to but this is actually quite a ways below where would start to thermal throttle on in video which is right around 94 C now the reason why temperatures matter is because as the GPU gets hotter the core speed is going to slow down which is what we've got right here so you can see it's GPU boost 3.0 is in full effect we are well over the base clock on this which is about sixteen hundred and eighty megahertz we've got a self overclock happening because it recognizes we have a lot of temperature Headroom available to us now I didn't do any overclocking on this yet we haven't touched the power sliders but what's interesting about this setup right now for our first test as you can see we've got a EVGA graphics card in there that has two fans that bring in air from the front so when you put it in the small form-factor like this and you put it near this mid plate which is kind of common now that you see in many cases to block off the power supply in the cables we've only got about five or well it's slanted a little bit so we've got less airflow in the back than the front it's kind of you know sagging a little bit but it's actually not able to pull up a whole lot of air right there now even though we have a front mounted radiator we're not going under a lot of CPU load so we're not putting much heat into that red but we are obviously decreasing the amount of intake air and if you look at the front of this case - it is a solid front panel right here that's only pulling in air from these you know perforations on the side so we've we've got a pretty good amount of airflow but this is still not the most ideal which is obviously a good for this test we want to see what happens under the less than ideal situations now the thing about the NZXT 200 eye is the fact that it has these in the mid plate it has these holes that are there now they're not super dense so it's still a decent amount of air that is being blocked off but I kind of want to see what happens if we now take those holes and block them off so I got a piece of tracing paper and I'm just gonna block off those holes because I think a lot of case manufacturers have a solid panel there at least based on what I've seen so if we take this now and it can't get any of that air from down into the shroud I'm curious as to how much the temperature is going to change now ideally you wouldn't want to you know choke off your graphics card but not all cases have that perforation in fact most of them it's a solid panel so obviously we want to see what the worst case is going to be immediately you can see we've already shot up almost three see though is sitting about 71 and in a matter of about 60 seconds we've come up to 73 C and our core clock has already started to drop a little bit so we're still sitting at the nineteen eleven but we're dropping down into the higher to mid 1800s so we're just gonna let that go for a little while now maybe we'll let it kind of equalize for about ten minutes and we'll come back and see where it's at so it's been running for about ten more minutes now and hasn't really changed that much so we gained about two to three C which I guess makes sense given the fact that we blocked off the air obviously but what we're thinking now is that the fan curve made up for it you could see where the temperatures shot up right here this is where we put the paper in this is where we came in here to add our fan curve our max fan speed was 58% and that's still pretty inaudible for the EVGA cooler and if you have an aftermarket graphics card that's pretty much what you can expect so what we're gonna do now that we're into the overclock side of things Before we jump over to the founders card I'm not gonna actually add more megahertz to the card what I'm gonna do is I'm going to remove the power limit or at least raise that up really high because that's now going to allow the graphics card to just overclock itself even further so if we come over here you see our power limit set to 100 our temp limit set to 84 if I just max this out and I don't touch core clock or memory clock we will see an increase in heat but we'll also see an increase in core clock you'll notice we're not fluctuating now nearly as much so until this temperature starts to rise to wherever it's P states are in its BIOS this won't start stepping down but more importantly that's going to stay more consistent which hopefully now will create more heat so we're gonna let this run for another 10 minutes with the paper in there we're gonna see what the max temperatures are and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the paper out and see what it comes back down to so it's pretty much where we stabilize it's bouncing between 73 and 74 the fans been increased slightly though went from 58 to 60 percent I could be wrong but I believe that's the max fan speed for factory on this EVGA card so I don't think it'll go faster than 60 but we still are locked here at 1911 so we came down one speed step these temperatures are actually really good because it's think about this we've got a small form-factor case we've got these perforations on the side sure it's fully open on the bottom but it's not pulling in air directly it's coming in through the sides of the case we've got a front mounted radiator and we've got a non blower style cooler sandwiched up against a mid plate that's blocked off now literally everything people say don't do it we're doing it and our temperatures are actually doing really really well so I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna pull the paper out and I'm gonna see if we come back down to 70 and if our fan speed comes back down I think the 74 see that we're seeing though is the fact that the room temp has come up ever so slightly and I think that that's what that is because as you bring up the ambient temperature in the room your temperature is in your graphics cards in your system and your CPU are going to rise incrementally with the ambient temperatures so I just pulled out the paper and we're gonna just let this run now and see if it comes back down I think it will interesting only enough or maybe not we stayed at roughly the same temperature didn't really fluctuate much but check it out we're staying at a slightly cooler temper and we stayed slightly higher on the core clock and it's not bouncing around so obviously the perforations in this particular case are doing something and blocking them off didn't actually seem to make much of a difference so I went ahead and decided I'm not going to run the founder's card in there because we already know that this is gonna be less affected by the case than a card like that and the air coming out of here is definitely warm but now the ultimate test right well J you should take this card and put it in a big case and see if you get the same results what I'm gonna kind of do here is I'm just gonna take off the side panel open this up so no longer is the intake or the overall volume of this chassis going to affect the temperatures of the GPU we are just gonna see now what happens as we let it just sort of have all the air breathe my friend breathe and I'm gonna kind of prop this up a little bit here so that we're not sagging and see if that makes any difference right oh god don't go in the fan oh that way like all the way back there shut up Nick uh can you give a screwdriver something for me from the toolbox right there something long and cylindrical and on the side but it should work it's not that far in there well we did like point seaside up so that would have gone in here right into the well guys we've taken the side panel off and nothing really changed you can see we're still sitting at 72 see 99% utilize 19:24 core and 57% fans B I thought what would happen is the fan speed would slow down to maintain these temps in this in this utilization but no you can feel the heat actually pushing off the side of this custom card I mean remember when you're doing the blower style card like this the air gets pulled in an exhaust every bit of that air out the back and so this is less impacted by whether or not you have good chassis cooling because all of the cooling happens here as long as it's got air going into it the rest has happening here these cards require the chassis to exhaust all of the hot air so even a small form-factor case like this with the graphics card only a few millimeters from the mid plate even when you block off that mid plate and have the side panel on we're pretty much the same as you see right here with this very ideal open side chassis and the air is actually pushing out from this graphics card and the chassis is no longer affecting the cooling pacifically we use the h 200 i from NZXT for this test this test but i think they did a great job at keeping this chassis nice and cool I'd like to revisit more tests like this where we test other chassis for this sort of thing so why don't you guys do me a favor why don't you put in the comments below a chassis that you think is notorious for killing off air flow to graphics cards well test it and if it's true maybe we'll modify it and see what it takes to get things breathing again anyway guys I'm gonna go thanks for watching make sure you comment down below and let me know what you thought and as always we'll see you in the next one
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