Gadgetory

if he thought skunkworks was cool then head on over to mod coolermaster calm and watched the biggest names in case modding compete for over $20,000 in cash and prizes hey what's going on guys Jays $0.02 here and today we're gonna look at something that is actually quite rare in North America I know right everything seems to be like centered in North America we're gonna be taking a look at the galaxy TX 980 Hall of Fame now one of the first things you'll notice about the Hall of Fame card is that it is absolutely monstrous the thing is huge it's got seven heat pipes on this thing ensuring that everything stays nice and cool you can actually see six in the back here but one loops towards the front but what actually makes this cooler very unique as well is that very few brands are actually incorporating the vrm into the massive heatsink design and a lot of times they'll have a smaller heatsink that the air blows over but these this massive cooler actually touches the VRMs which is important because when you have a custom built card like this where everything from the ground up is built from scratch then they can do things like that and it works out very very well it's in requires two 8-pin PCI Express and it does have two eighty millimeter fans and 190 millimeter fan on the front now unlike most graphics card manufacturers where they put a little toggle switch on the top of the card here for going between the different bios they actually put a button on the back and this is nice because it means you don't have to open up your case to switch the BIOS on this thing if you want to kind of play around with it you can simply push it on the back now pushing this thing in does ramp up the fan speed on this thing it does also increase the power that goes to the GPU theoretically giving it better overclocking but of course overclocking is always going to come down to the luck of the draw when it comes to the Silicon Lottery inside of the die itself and one of the other things that makes Galax cards extremely sought-after it's the fact that they have all white PCBs now in the back here as you can see we do have a bare anodized aluminum backplate or aluminium people always get on to me for saying aluminum it's how we say it here sorry to America but you have the white PCB you have the white ends gray cooler on there it's all moment the black fan in the middle and then you do have the aluminium backplate on there which just looks absolutely fantastic you do have three display ports an HDMI and a DVI which is pretty standard and you know what there's not a whole lot else to say about this thing other than it's got all the standard 980 specs built from the ground up I say we put this thing on the test bench and actually let it put its money where Malthus let's face it when it comes to the cost of this card it does carry quite a premium here in the United States especially considering you can't actually get them in the United States very easily at all I bet everyone else in the rest of the world is like finally the United States knows exactly what we're going through well not me I've got one well I think the first thing I want to point out is that what that button pushed in the fan is going or the fans are going absolutely balls to the wall and there's no control over it it's idling at 29 degrees Celsius 30 degrees Celsius but as you can see here the RPM is 3,200 rpm and there is nothing that you can do to control that I mean whether it's on auto or manual no matter what you've got no control over the fan it just goes balls-to-the-wall so the second you push that button and turn it off then the fans no longer ramp up but they claim you get more power controls so let's go ahead and see if we can overclock this thing you know that's what they say you can do so anyway okay now I've gone ahead and done a plus 100 megahertz over whatever the boost is gonna be we've put 90 degrees Celsius as our priority target for GPU temp that's fine it's not going to hit 90 we just don't want it to use power target as our limiter it does allow us to go 16% on the power target over where a factory is and we added 300 to our memory even though the GTX Maxwell series has it's like power balancing function where it's supposed to add more power to the memory when it's not being used I found that I still get very good results about overclocking the memory then letting it do it by itself because half the time it doesn't change it anyway so anyway let's go ahead and go into some valley here and just do some stability testing and let's see if this overclocked well validates that's that's where I start my testing as Valley benchmark because it's pretty and I like it all right so I've been a little bit less than thrilled with the overclocking of this card and of course it comes down to the lottery and I've also been less than thrilled with precision honestly everything has been kind of like go like crap today huh let's go ahead and relaunch precision so I haven't been able to get this Hall of Fame card anywhere near neither the 980 classified from EVGA or the 980 hybrid water-cooled one from EVGA which is a reference PCB which is crazy so that just kind of goes to show that no matter what the silicon lottery is gonna play a factor no matter how custom we make the board no matter how amazing you make the vrm is no matter how high the inductors quality inductors you use or it being ten phases eight plus two for the RAM or you know it doesn't matter if the silicon quality isn't there to get you the amazing results then no matter what you put on it it's not gonna do it so I ended up turning off that stupid switch in the back too because I couldn't tolerate the noise anymore I'm not I'm not a fan of them forcing a hundred percent fan speed out of you but I guess it makes sense if they're pushing more power to the GPU but one of the reasons why I also backed off that button and that fan speed was the extra fan speed and the extra cooling wasn't giving me any additional performance whatsoever at least on this particular samples so anyway it looks like the we load up valley again here real quick it looks like we're gonna be settling on right around 1,500 maybe fifteen ten on the core and I did a lot of much stability testing here outside of you know the camera off because it ended up taking a lot longer there's no way I could have actually done any of this with on camera because you guys would have gone completely insane so yeah so 15 15 is where it's pretty much going and it's not terrible but it's not I know if it's really it's not top of the list on nine 80s anyway one another thing I want to point out too is no matter how much additional voltage control I give it here you know it only gives you a plus 37 millivolt on this thing because it's already got high quality VRMs in there which are doing over voltage already so this didn't make any sort of difference whatsoever kay boost all that stuff it didn't really seem nummy nothing mattered anyway I'm using precision on this and caboose is more of a forcing high voltage constant voltage so anyway it didn't make any sort of difference in terms of overclocking so we're just gonna leave it here and we'll go and check out some Far Cry 4 after we update steam there's something I want to point out listen to this inductor noise so yeah I grant it we were in the menu and it was or the loading screen and it was high FPS I just want to point out that these adductors are very very audible even right now 256 frames per second in this loading screen I can hear the inductors over there so that's not a good thing of course I've got vsync off but of course we won't be sync and gsync off of one to test max FPS and see what the cards capable of pushing so it's one other thing that I noticed here while looking around in a few games with this card specifically that does not happen on any other card that I own is 1440 will not show up as an option it jumps directly from 1920 by 1080 to 3840 by 2160 so goes from 1080 to 4k there's no 1440p option so I don't know what's up with that but this this card is getting a little bit funkier and funkier the more I yeah say even on auto aspect ratio 1920 straight up to 38 40 he just quadruples all of a sudden it won't it won't give me 1440 options so I don't know what's up with that I don't want to test this card at 1080p but I want to test it at 4k there because I know this one card is not capable of 480 or 4k at a decent framerate so I guess we'll go forward with 1080 as you guys can see I'm kind of blocked on this one here whatever okay one thing I just want to point out right now is the inductors are going I mean the inductors are very very noisy even at 95 fps right now in the game the inductors are going very very haywire I mean the FPS is definitely not disappointing but then again we are in 1080p so yeah I don't know why it won't get me 1440p option though all the other entities that I have every other graphics card I have will give me the option of you know any resolution at any aspect ratio up to a certain point anyway we'll get into a gunfight here we'll see how the FPS does hello I'm at bullets I am dead yeah I mean the FPS is good but it's 1080p so it should be good alright so I decided for the last test instead of doing battlefield or whatever we'll go ahead and do some watchdogs we don't know done watchdogs in a while I'm not very far into the game but I do have all the settings completely maxed out right now including the MSA right 1920 by 1080 again the next resolution that gives me up is 2048 by 1536 that's kind of a weird resolution I don't know why it's doing that as you can see it's a little bit squished so I don't know why it's doing that so I guess we're gonna go to 1920 by 1080 MSA is at 4x and we do have vsync off and GPU max buffered frames 5 I bump it up to 5 so it's trying to render out ahead as much as possible but as you can see I mean we're getting FPS in the 80s here it's very smooth there's gonna be some tearing though this is a 60 Hertz panel so I should think this is the way we were going right but I do want to point out once again the inductor noise is pretty loud the sad part is having lost all of my progress in this game I do love the way this guy could just kind of like pick up anything and like MacGyver it into you know whatever you want it's kind of funny yeah I could just be like oh let's craft a hacking device out of an item I just picked up off the counter it's okay because I'm a gamer throw a distraction over there lure him over there and there he goes the cops like huh what happy yeah yeah I don't know wait no wait over there yeah that cop is dumb it's fine a guy we can hack there we go he now has two hundred twenty dollars in the bank he had a lot more than that beforehand I love that this guy makes three million a year and she makes fifty four thousand a year working with him or whatever that's funny labor and employment attorney only makes 62,000 that's kind of crazy so yeah I mean FPS you can see sitting right about 60 but inductor noise again making all kinds of noise so yeah I guess we'll go ahead and jump into the conclusion here well there you go guys the Galax gtx 980 hall of fame I'm still torn on whether or not I want to keep doing these live benchmarks I feel like you guys get a little bit less information overall but you guys get a little bit more raw info on how it's performing as it's happening so again I'm gonna pull you guys down the description there's gonna be a straw poll you guys use that link to tell me do more live benchmarks or just start giving you guys more graphs and things with maybe some live benchmarks I don't know just answer the question down there and you guys tell me what you want to see I kind of overall feel like you get list info but I know maybe you guys like seeing the way things are going like for instance the inductor noise you guys could hear that it was it was pretty bad which is funny because Galax advertises that they use high quality inductors so that you don't get that noise but clearly I was getting the noise at standard FPS now when you start getting massive SP FPS like 3000 fps in the loading screen you're gonna get some inductor and always no matter what but I do find that at anywhere between 60 to 90 fps getting inductor noise that's audible over the fans that's not good I also didn't do a lot of tests on this card because it started to become pretty apparent to me right off the bat that I wasn't entirely impressed with this card I mean it looks pretty it's one of the coolest cards on the market in fact the max temperatures on this thing I forgot to even bring that up for you guys looks like we maxed out at 77 degrees that was probably during farcry it was pretty warm when I got my hand near it during farcry not as warm Dearing watchdog's but I'm a little disappointed by the inductor noise I would say I'm disappointed by the overclocking and the fact that we only reached 1500 megahertz but that's still a good overclock overclocking is not guaranteed on these cards this card does boost up on its own up into the mid-1400s again Silicon Lottery there's no control over the manufacturer on that I mean unless they're gonna be doing a lot of pinning you know it is what it is so the card is pretty it's gonna have its aesthetics that it fits in in many builds like white builds and especially if you're doing like the new Asus Tough Series limited edition motherboards it's gonna look really nice in those types of builds this may have just been a sample thing I mean there's our retail samples or not you know tested before they're sent to us otherwise they would be completely biased reviews and we would never trust the manufacturers because we would always assume they're sending us their best I want retail samples when I do my reviews and that's what I got here so you never know you guys may see other hall-of-fame reviews too where they're getting higher overclocks and better scores but that's you know luck of the draw once again so I think the Galax GTX 980 Hall of Fame definitely has its demographic that it's gonna appeal to it's got all the standard features that you would expect with Maxwell neo voxel and the efficiency that comes with Maxwell but personally I'm a little bit disappointed in the overall quality of the inductors and the noise that those were making I could I could live with the FPS and stuff but the fact that I could hear the inductors over the fans was kind of a real disappointment so you guys tell me are you using a Hall of Fame card 980 or even a 780 older Hall of Fame how's it performing for you guys what do you look for in graphics cards what do you think of the white I do wish there were more white options but right now the Hall of Fame from Galax definitely has the white PCB thing like nailed down that's definitely there's so anyway guys thanks for watching today's video hope you guys have enjoyed I am enjoy making it for you this is like definitely a pretty much a dream job where I get to play with all this cool hardware until you guys how I feel about it and I do like to hear from you guys on how you feel about it so check out all the social medias you guys are interested in connecting and as always guys thanks for watching