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MSI GTX1080 GAMING X 8G - Performance and Overclocking Review

2016-06-08
what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and I know you guys have been waiting a little while for this one I apologize for delay but stick to the end of the video and you'll understand why it took so long to get this video out but just before Computex started msi sent me the very first sample of the msi 1080 gaming x 8g they threw a lot of new features in the Twin Frozr 6 design to try and keep things as cool as possible 2 custom PCB extra power phases and all that stuff so we're going to see exactly how well it performs right after the break I'm get ready to have a lot of fun benchmarking this graphics card but you know what's more fun than benchmarking building websites okay that was I know that was pretty unbelievable because building websites is typically tedious and not fun or easy at all but that's where Squarespace comes in because with their integrated tools it doesn't matter if you're building a hobby page a company page or an e-commerce page they've got everything you need to get you 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your card as cool as possible a huge heatsink running the almost the entire length of the card it actually stops a little bit short which is kind of different normally they run past the length of the card but we've got heat sinks all over the place we've got active cooling for the vrm we've got 8 heat pipes on this thing one of the things they change with this design was the heat pipes and what a lot of companies have done is they'll take a round heat pipe and they'll mill the bottom of it flat that way it can mate against a flat material like the baseplate touching the GPU die to transfer the heat into the heat pipes but what they've done on this one here is instead of it being a round pipe all the way through the round pipe transitions to a square pipe giving you more contact in more surface area on the actual heat plate giving you better heat dissipation typically to get it perfectly flat so that the entire surface area of the pipe or at least the one hemisphere of the pipe is touching it would mean that it they have to file all the way through and then it breaks open but with the square design you get more surface area touching the die giving you even better cooling results so that's something worth keeping in mind especially with all the discussion about is the 1080 running to hot definitely temperatures are kept in check with this guy you'll see it in the video or you saw it in the previous video but it's got a whole new power delivery system it's got 10 phase power delivery 8-pin plus 6 pin on here which a lot of people were complaining about they're only being an 8 pin on the founder's card and it gives you 270 watt TDP limit at 100% and if you bump it up to the 107 % TDP limit you get 290 watts worth of GPU power quite a bit more than the reference design so with all of that in mind one of the things were going to be testing in this video is how well does it overclock now because I'm going to do all that this video might be a little bit longer than normal I apologize for that if it is but I don't want to cut out important information for the sake of making a video a little bit shorter and easier to watch any video I'm in is going to be hard to watch so just get some popcorn buckle in and get ready to cringe because that's the way we do things around here but I want to get as much information out as I possibly can connectors on the back of the same as reference we've got three DisplayPort one HDMI and our dual link DVI and of course guys we have a backplate I mean you know that they would go without putting a backplate on a card at this level because pricing right now it's a little bit of a mystery they haven't listed pricing yet it's not available really any retailers but while searching the internet I found one post where someone said they found it in u.s. dollars for 750 dollars but that it was immediately taken off the website so I have no idea what pricing is is why you're not going to see a pricing sheet or any sort of a chart pricing on this because if what that said was true then this card might cost more than the founders edition which is kind of a fear of mine where typically custom cards are more expensive than reference but with the weird weird price modeling this time around of reference being 700 MSRP being 600 are the custom cards going to be in between 6 and 7 or are they going to be more than 7 I don't I don't know it'll be unfortunate I think if they turn out being more than 7 but I guess we're going to have to wait and find out I mean after all some of the custom cards last time around with Maxwell were upwards of $1,000 and I'm not talking about Titan I'm talking my custom 980ti designs but I think one thing I find a little bit disappointing is I was kind of hoping for a dual BIOS card at the very least now this does have built-in switchable settings in the BIOS that you can control through the MSI gaming app where you can do a silent mode a gaming mode and then an overclocking mode where it will just change the fan profile and the max GPU boost depending on which one you select now being a gamer and an overclocker enthusiast like I am I chose to let this thing go up to the max boost with the fan profile being a little bit more aggressive than being on just the standard gaming mode so with all that said and all the b-roll out of the way let's go ahead and jump into the benchmarks and then jump right into the overclocking okay so let's talk about overclocking obviously the 10:18 uses GPU boost 3.0 which gives us additional curve and voltage that we can set to try and get more efficient power use but do pubis isn't necessarily going to give us additional overclocking ability if you will it just allows us to play with a custom curve a voltage right here as you can see where as the frequency ramps up so does the voltage that way it doesn't have to go all the way to max voltage giving us a ton of heat and a ton of inefficiency when we're not ramping all the way up to our max clocks so that's what GPU boost 3 is but it works a little bit differently here now where as you move the core clock here it also moves that entire voltage slider so that way everything stays the same that way if you were to increase the the core clock offset you're not increasing higher voltage at lower frequencies where you don't necessarily need it but the curve does still stay the same now you can move each unit one of these individual points if you want but well that's a whole different video about how to use GPU boost 3.0 the point of this video is to see how well is this card overclocked so that doesn't really matter right now because I want to take full manual control over this so what I did is I moved the core voltage all the way to plus 100 power limits at 107 one thing to note on that that's 107 percent of 270 watt TDP which is up from the I believe 170 could be wrong I'll annotate it if I'm wrong but whatever the base T V P is or max TDP is here for the reference card excuse me founders card whatever they're calling it this year that's 107 percent of a higher number which is why that total additional power limit is less so even though at 100 we're allowing 270 watts which is about a hundred watts more than founders we can still increase it all the way to 290 watts which is 107 percent so we can actually make the card pool quite a bit of juice the core clock I'm only going at plus 50 on this now I know that sounds kind of weird but this it actually ramped up past its max 1873 megahertz boost clock to nineteen hundred and thirty six in my testing so this is an offset of where GPU boost is going to go so that's not added to the base that added to the boost which is why we only went with plus fifty and I'll explain that in a minute I also went plus two hundred and fifty on the core or exit of the memory which is a little bit disappointing because some of the other cards we could actually get more out of that but this is as far as I could take the card this is good for 2025 megahertz before we start crashing now I know that sounds a little bit disappointing and I'll kind of show that here right now but as we run the test I spent a solid week and a half playing around with overclocks on this thing and even got MSI involved to make sure that I wasn't somehow messing this up where I was doing something wrong when it came to the overclocks because I expected a lot more core clock out of this right now it's actually running at 2030 just dropped to 2025 it was at 2038 it dropped to 2025 and if I push this any farther if I try and go any higher on this it will crash in fact let me go ahead and Emin straight that now 2088 on the core a 100% load on the GPU 70% fan speed 1.08 one volt the reason why I'm calling out the volts it'll make sense in a minute here and as you can see it just crashed so we can't hit that magical 20 100 megahertz number wait for it and see its pausing now it's completely food borrowing the the drivers crashing and recovering and dry crashing and recovering and I think that's it I think it's done now hope anyway free one stop the test it's pretty obvious then we're not going to get any farther so here's what we're going to do I'm going to put in my founders Carter we're going to compare you guys saw that 2050 was a pretty much the max that we can get out of this but then it drops down to 2025 for whatever reason I can't get it to stay at 2050 it always comes back down so let's go ahead and see how the founders card does to compare remember no one has won eight pin power power pin and it doesn't have all the additional power phases all right so the founders card is install you can see it right there so we're gonna do all of the same testing that we just did with the msi card here it is right there got a got to say that is one hell of a sexy cooler though right back late and all that stuff all right I'm off track here so again I'm gonna bump that voltage all the way up I'm going to put the power limit all the way to 120 percent and I'm going to start here with a core clock of let's do 200 and a memory clock of 500 let's see what happens here apply it and let's just see what we boost up to here we're going to open up heaven again it's all the same okay so that boosted right up to twenty eighty eight at 1.06 two volts 1.07 five but it's staying at twenty eighty eight and then the fan speed will be increasing here so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to go ahead and go through all of my testing and we'll see where it crashes and then we'll come back and we'll compare the two I suppose okay so I think I've got my numbers here 20 126 is what I'm up nope 2126 crash so let's back it off just a little bit then so close that 2100 numbers like a unicorn I tell you okay I think we're good now the cards been running forever it sounds like a hair blower it's running at 2088 megahertz the voltage keeps dropping note goes all the way from one point zero nine two down to one point zero five Oh regardless of where I set the voltage curve so it won't let me even control the voltage like I want it's even though it gives you slider control I don't like GPU boost 3.0 I'm saying it here it takes away too much control I can't wait for custom BIOS to be dropped for these cards that way I can mix all that crap and actually control it myself but anyway 2088 megahertz is where we are temperatures right now is at 69 C with the fan of the hundred percent but as you can see I'm getting 50 more megahertz out of the reference card than I was out of this guy right here so why is that you might be asking yourself why is that J well I'm going to tell you right now now I think there might have been a collective sigh heard around the world right now after seeing those overclocking results because a lot of people gave Nvidia a bunch of saying why is there only one 8-pin power plug on there that's stupid that's going to limit the amount of overclocking you can get because most people are used to seeing two power plugs on the flagship GPU this is kind of the first time we've seen a flagship like this and it's quite a few years only have one power plug so obviously the board partners have come out with their custom designs and this one as we already showed has an eight pin plus a 6 pin increase TDP to 270 watts one hundred and seven percent gives us two hundred and ninety watts which is well more than 100 watts more than the founders Edition card is allowed when it comes to total power and we've got ten phases on here so why didn't it go farther than the founders or should I rephrase that why did the founders go farther than this one guys it comes down to the silicon lottery it really does that's just the luck of the draw when it comes to how far something is going to overclocked and no amount of power adapters or power phases is going to change that of course those can have an influence on how far this can go if you do things like custom ln2 cooling unlock the voltage and really start hacking things being a consumer buying an out of the card box or out of the box card like this silicon lottery is going to have a bigger impact on your total overclocking ability than the amount of power phases and plugs thrown onto a card but as you just saw adding an extra power pin did not increase the amount of overclocking that you can get out of a 1080 or Pascal GP 104 core it is always going to be the silicon lottery that reigned supreme but if you're not an overclocker and you just want to buy a graphics card you want to take it out of the box you want to toss the box aside and you want to just put the card in your system and start gaming then as you guys saw this thing ramped up to nineteen hundred and thirty six megahertz and it did it at 73 degrees Celsius max with the fans running 57 percent speed if you guys are wondering when I'm referencing it was also the video before this one where I showed how this card performs in a case versus an open-air test bench because of the amount of debate going on about that temperature testing on this was no different when doing gaming it is a phenomenal cooler double ball-bearing design gets long lifespan to the fans that makes them extremely quiet no buzzing coil whine on this card was a minimum it was there was some noticeable coil winding games I got high PS and like 1080p but in a closed case like the s340 there was no noticeable coil whine you've got RGB control of the MSI logo as well as these red kind of gills right here whatever will calm these dragon fins right here scales do you can't change the color but again they're red so it's always going to have kind of a reddish hue to it and you still have the red shroud right here so no matter what you change the LED color to you're going to have the red on the cooler but the heat pipe design on this with the square pipes touching the dye offering a massive amount of cooling obviously keeps the temperatures under check and keeps those core clocks nice and high giving you the best performance available now one of the reasons why this video took so long was because I was really worried that I was somehow fouling up the overclock testing and that's why the card wasn't performing as well as my Founders edition card and with Computex going on there was a delay in communication with MSI so it took a while to get responses but once we did it turned out that the official answer was if you want to get a great overclocking experience then wait for the MSI 1080 lightning Edition which again is going to fall under the same silicon lottery scenario but hopefully they do a better job at bending those then say you know a gaming card like this they did say that this card was built for gaming first overclocking second so the extra power on here is only going to guarantee that you get a really good boosting experience on its own and a I guess kind of a mediocre experience unless you end up with a serious silicon lottery winner those were my results so take them for what you will this is the part of the video where I like to get you guys involved sound off in the comments about if you were surprised whether or not this particular card that I have and my sample didn't overclock as far as you guys were hoping because I think the amount of people that were mad at Nvidia for only putting 1/8 pin power on their GPU saying that it was going to limit the overclocking well as you could see a poor silicon lottery winner cannot be really pushed any farther by adding more power and more power phases it's really going to be coming down to how far the core itself decides it wants to go whether or not it's going to be a lazy pig just sitting there not to move anyway guys there you go thanks for watching sound off in the comments follow on Twitter for more behind the scenes stuff I've been showing some pictures and whatnot of this behind the scenes anything on Instagram you guys can always know what's coming up first if you follow their if not well then you'll just have to see what's next in the next video thanks for watching guys and as always I'll see you the next one
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