Gadgetory

okay we've got a lot to talk about today we've got gigabytes new g1 gaming RX 488 gigabyte graphics card you guys have been wanting to see some custom 480 stuff here on the channel actually got this couple weeks ago but you haven't seen the video yet because this review has not quite gone as smoothly as I had hoped now on a high level here we're just talk about some of the basics this is a fully custom PCB from gigabyte the g1 gaming board is a custom it is not a reference in any way custom cooler in fact the only thing AMD about it really is the Polaris GPU inside of it now this is a 8 gigabyte card I don't know if it has a 4 gigabyte model to be honest with you but this one is an 8 gigabyte card now it's got a modest bump um boost clock over the reference design references 1266 and this one is twelve hundred and ninety so that's only 24 megahertz of boost it is not going to even be noticeable while you're gaming a difference of 24 megahertz so that's already kind of disappointing right off the bat a custom card a custom BCB a custom cooler 8 pin power connector on there giving you more Headroom when it comes to power draw and power limit and only 24 megahertz of boost and the memory is running at the exact same reference speed so there's no bump in memory speed whatsoever ok so at the risk of just talking for an hour and making this an unbearable video to watch more so than it already is because my face is on your monitor and I apologize that your pixels are being momentarily inconvenienced with that task I want to go ahead and show you the benchmarks and talk about a couple of things now as you watch these benchmarks I want you to keep a couple of things in mind one the 1060 is in there only because I know people are going to ask me how does it compare to the 1060 it's the exact same 1060 results I ran in the past it is the SC model from EVGA which is a reference PCB it is not a custom board is not a custom card it is only a single fan cooler on there and a slight bump to the boost clock there is no overclocking applied to the 1060 that was GPU boost taking care of everything the reference 480 however is running a custom fan curve on there to keep the card from slowing down at all as the reference cooler gets warm and because the factory temperature target is 80 that cooler hits 80 and then once it does that it will start to slow itself down so I ran a custom fan curve because I didn't want the thing to throttle and I wanted to see how it compared at 1266 versus 1290 so I went ahead and did that so I want you guys keep that in mind a reference card out of the box with the fan profile will be slower than the results if you see now now now for those of you that we're paying attention and saw the temperature slides you probably kind of went whoa whoa whoa pump the brakes hear what the actual fuck is happening with the temperatures let's talk about that because that's the part that I've been having some problems with here the reference card was running unaggressive fan curve as I said so we were kept from hitting the temperature limit which meant that the card wasn't throttling and that's the whole reason why I did that because I wanted to kind of simulate what I thought the aftermarket PCB and aftermarket cooler situation would be like on a reference card and that's why I used those numbers again now with this card here unfortunately the fan profile is extremely conservative because it airs on the side of noise so it doesn't want to get too loud and in-your-face so unfortunately what it does is it allows the card to get all the way up to 80 once again on a custom PCB with a custom cooler I started wondering if what else is going on here so when I overclocked it and ran the fans at 90% we still hit 88 see in a few benchmarks like Metro last light and when I do those charts I always show what the max temperature was in any of my tests which happened to be 88 C and it was still climbing when the test ended so it could have potentially hit the new limit of 90 which is set during overclocking that in my opinion is way too hot for this cooler I don't know why it's doing that I want to go ahead live on camera take the cooler off but the the PCB and I want to see if there's something going on with the thermal compound so it's going to do this is go ahead and take the cooler off and see what we find it's kind of hard to tell but it does seem to me like there is a little bit under applied thermal paste I guess you I guess you could say so here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go ahead and put on the same thermal paste I using my water block so this is just the ek Tim the Eco therm they sell and send with all of their water blocks so I'm gonna clean this off I'm gonna apply new thermal paste looks like it's making good contact with the heat pipes right there as you can see we've got our VRAM heat pads on here I mean everything's making good contact our vrm pads right there so yeah I'm going to do I'm going to go ahead and I am just going to reapply the thermal paste run the test again and see if the temperatures improve you can see we're still hitting 78 see right now with all the stock settings so this is the second run actually just I've had Metro looping this is now the start of the second loop and were already at 78 I wouldn't be surprised if this is back at 80 by the end of the loop so it doesn't I'm not hopeful that this did anything for the overclocking results whatsoever I mean a couple nope there's 79 it's gonna hit 80 all right conclusion time replacing the thermal paste made no difference whatsoever now what's kind of neat about the AMD stuff is you can actually see how many watts it's pulling as you saw it went from about 120 527 watch at stock all the way up to almost 200 watts when overclocked but what this is telling me is for some reason this cooler is not able to actually dissipate 200 watts of heat now what I find kind of interesting too and the reason why I thought it might have been thermal paste is the air that's coming off the card when you put your hands around the card and you feel the air it's not that warm which made me think that heat wasn't making it out of the core and into the heat pipes and out into the atmosphere and touching the back plate on the card was like burn you levels of hot it was really hot so I started thinking maybe the thermal paste is just bad but as you can see that wasn't the case now if you're the kind of person that wants to buy a graphics card you don't want to overclock you just want to put it in and off you go you're still not going to be hands-off with this card you still need to go in and do a custom fan profile speed up the fan so that you're not hitting a decease you get the full benefit of the card as you saw there it's not running at 1290 megahertz out of the box it is capable of hitting 1290 bits always slowing down which is really really unfortunate because the advertised boost clock is not what you're actually getting but once you go in and play with the fan profile a little bit and up the power limit a little bit then it will actually give you those numbers but I did the very same thing with my reference card so really I don't feel like and my reference card is also able to overclock to the levels of this card no problem which with the exception of acoustics didn't feel like there was a whole lot of benefit to this so this is where I need you guys to chime in this card has been available on the market for a few weeks now I need to know if you bought this card if you were seeing similar results or if it looks like something might be up with this card I'm genuinely disappointed I expected and hoped for more out of a custom RX 480 I really did but that is what it is and I showed you guys the numbers live there's no there's no shenanigans happening it's I mean I'm I'm really disappointed right now I truly am so I'm gonna go drown my sorrows in a I don't know coffee or something I'm gonna go alright see you guys on the next one