Gadgetory

recently we made a video investigating the usefulness of video card back plates in a shocking surprise to no one the thermal benefit was marginal if anything at all so then when EVGA called us up inviting us to check out their top-secret icx technology that was going to solve video card thermal issues we had to wonder I mean is this just another case of gluing on more bloody fans and back plates or is it a worthwhile innovation the phoenix auteur is a full-sized minimalistic li designed keyboard complete with Cherry MX switches and a new white backlit variant check it out at the link below what the crap is icx technology how do I even pronounce that I sigh 6i6 well whatever EVGA is marketing team helpfully describes it as a new and more efficient way to cool with optimized airflow fin design which is a good start because an old and less efficient way to cool with an unauthorized airflow fin design would raise a lot of questions essentially what it boils down to is this rather than try to sell us a revolutionary fan blade design or whatever it's more about data icx relies on nine discrete thermal sensors to dramatically expand the cards monitoring capabilities so in addition to the GPU we now get readings for each Bank of vram and the power delivery modules the cooler can then take advantage of this sensor data to intelligently cool the entire card as needed to the point of independently controlling its two fans if let's say the GPU temps would allow a normal card to spin down but the rear portion of the card was still hot pretty cool concept and they've tacked on every other feature that they can think of as well like the perforated heatsink fins low-power fans for additional GPU power to budget really you guys and a back plate that EVGA says helps with cooling a claim that seems to be in vogue these days all of this of course culminating in the bold statement play longer overclock better so how do we test these claims in our possession is a brand new EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 super clock 2 with an all-metal design with a diecast backplate a clean industrial aesthetic the aforementioned perforated heatsink fins and of course I see X as a super clocked card this sits in the middle of EVGA x' line up with a 100 megahertz bump over the reference design and we'll be running it on our RGB test bench so it's a core i7 7700 k at both out of the box and overclocked speeds time for the fuzzy donut of death yes fir marks back and so are the settings from the backplate bench's stock settings save from a mac style power and temperature targets the results well that's unsurprisingly the first interesting aspect of the IC X design there are a lot of them for the GPU it was stable at 68 degrees centigrade while the memory came in at 80 and the power delivery hit 81 all of this with no thermal throttling traditional tools like fur marks integrated GPU temperature readout would have only shown us the 68 degree figure which means that already icx is doing its job so then we gave it a tidy 100 megahertz overclock to both core and memory keeping in mind of course that the super clock 2 is already overclocked out of the box and went back to Tim Hortons for another fuzzy donut and 68 degrees centigrade on the GPU 84 the memory and 81 for the power delivery again zero throttling I'm noticing a pattern here the super clock too icx is a good card and measures up well to the ars that we checked out recently but this sensor tech just doesn't really seem to do anything for performance duress li and under normal conditions both fans go full blast when the cards working hard and sit idle when you leave it for a while so why did they bother developing this where could it make a difference well there are a couple of situations one of which we caught on our thermal camera naturally because the independently controlled fans spin up and down based on the temperatures in their corresponding zones the total time each fan needs to stay spun up can be optimized for a quicker return to quiet operation so with precision we can see the temperatures winding down and the respective fans slowing down after we close a 3d application situation number two is less to do with acoustics and more to do with longevity not every video card enjoys the luxury of an open test bench or a full ATX tower and hot recycled air or air flow restrictions in smaller cases could lead to higher temperatures for the vrm reducing its efficiency hurting performance and shortening its lifespan so with our obstruction in the way of this fan we can see some car temperature's rising even when the GPU is not being stressed this is a likely scenario in a compact case and icx ramps the fan accordingly cool literally in our perfect world there is still some work to be done here independent control of the fans curves is neat but a robust implementation of a feature EVGA is teasing right now that would allow other system coolers to be controlled as well would allow us to for example point a side panel fan at the cards backplate which reached a toasty 74 degrees Celsius in our tests back plates don't normally contribute to video card cooling much if at all but in this manner it's possible that it could so what do you guys think then would you pay extra for more temperature sensors do you appreciate the extra control let us know in the comments below synergy is really freaking cool it basically works like magic okay it's not magic it's complicated software engineering but the end result seems like magic you can share one Mouse and one keyboard between two computers so you no longer have to think about like oh do I need to do something on that one or that one no you just drag the mouse from one to the other end boom you're switched it's amazing and it gets even better you can actually do it between computers with completely different operating systems Windows Linux Mac you can drag a single mouse across them it's amazing they've got a basic and a pro option with one-time payment for lifetime access and the features include even advanced stuff like clipboard sharing between the computers so check it out you can use our link in the video description to get 25% off synergy today so thanks for watching guys dislike or like accordingly get subscribed and if you really like the video check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is a link to our t-shirt store as well as our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click on a little featured video that we have I guarantee you'll be awesome like totally awesome