Gadgetory

excellent last week EVGA invited a small group of tech writers and youtubers to their US headquarters in Brea California Jay and Kyle were both there also Steve from gamers Nexus and we got a little tour and it was all quite lovely EVGA wanted to show us their newest graphics card series no it's not a vega card or a 1080 TI but a second lineup of nvidia 10 series based cards with icx technology they are not just slapping new coolers on existing GPUs though these cards have completely redesigned PCBs and EVGA has patents granted or pending for 11 new integrated technologies in these cards before I get into what some of those are though why would Eva GA launch a new product line in the middle of a GPU lifecycle like this many of you may immediately point out to the problems that they have with the 1080 and 1070 for the wind cards which in a very limited number of cases caught fire while on use due to overheating VRMs limited yet but it was enough that EVGA decided to issue a recommended firmware update and shipped customers a new thermal pad kit if they wanted it they did not deny that the vrm issue definitely pushed this launch forward for icx a little bit more quickly but it would be wrong to say this is a hundred percent a reaction to it they were working on these designs long before that story broke also to be clear the icx series cards which will come in gtx 1060 1070 and 1080 variants will not be replacing the current ACX cards the issue with ATX cards has been resolved they're still for sale and these icx cards will probably cost twenty to thirty dollars more here is what that extra money will get you though first off of course as mentioned they're going to be available in 1070 1060 and 1080 varieties I have the 1080 for the win at two right here and you'll notice two after the difference typical naming schemes from EVGA to indicate icx as well as course icx logos on the box now these GPUs have nine sensors that are integrated onto the PCB they're specifically geared to test the GPU temperature providing additional thermal probes beyond what's already there in the GPU itself power and memory areas as well the new PCB design allows these sensors to be placed in close proximity those heat generating components because especially if you look at nvidia gpus over the past few years they've gotten very efficient and in fact the GPU is not always the hottest part of the graphics card anymore in fact VRMs and memory can overheat as well so keeping tabs on the temperatures for those critical critical components is very important now they're going to check and monitor these temperatures via NFC use or micro control units and they've scattered these across the board these are programmable from my understanding and they can actually do lots of different things whereas right now they're being used for things like temperature temperature control and reactive lighting on the board it could be programmed potentially to do other things as well another advancement is asynchronous fans they actually have separated their fans so that the left one is primarily there and ties to GPU temperatures and it's actually going to be more directly cooling the GPU as well and then the right fan is actually going to be tied to your memory and your power temperatures the upshot to that is that if your GPU starts to get hot the left fan will spin up if your memory or your VRMs start to get hot the right fan will spin up then of course if everything starts to heat up if you have a card under serious load they'll both spin up but they'll spend at different speeds and you can actually control them individually there's two separate fan curves available in the precision XOC software so you can have controller in both of those and tune them to your heart's content EVGA also redesigned the base plate and the back plate for this card they're diecast and they are form fitted so that they can make more contact which is a different heat generating perch of the GPU so they're going to actually act more as he sticks now base plates and back plates have been able to do this to some extent in the past but Eva GA has expanded on the design making more direct contacts with those vital components and creating what they're calling pin fins just to create a little bit more surface area on the base plate itself and that should theoretically allow more heat to be sunk into those heat sinks then of course dissipated as the air flows over it they've also redesigned the actual aluminum thin stack itself they have created what they're calling a half-open design so they have kind of l-shaped fins that are staggered nuts to allow both more surface area but to also allow the air to flow through there a little bit more easily when doing side-by-side comparisons with the old for the wind design they notice that they would get actual pushback from the fans as they were pushing air onto the fins whereas this allows the air to flow through it more easily so you don't get that bounce-back effect from the fans train to actually cool the fins off you also have more direct airflow and it can flow through the thin holes that are there as well just just a hole staggered throughout those fins again more airflow and according to EVGA is testing also lower temperatures you're going to get because of that they've integrated a safety fuse onto the board as well this one seems to have limited actual usage in my personal opinion it's really there as a worst case scenario fail-safe if you still solder all over here you're the back of your your graphics card and then you try to power it on or something that few should pop before more vital components overheat so it could again in those extreme worst-case scenarios maybe prevent a fire in your computer but it's not something that's like you use a serviceable or anything like that if that fuse goes you're probably going to have to arm a the board but it may allow EVGA to do more recovery from RMA's and cards that actually do fail now again just to point out the ACX coolers will still be around along with the icx coolers the ACX coolers will be a little bit less expensive and you can expect the icx cooler based GPUs to be about twenty to thirty dollars more so let's talk some testing next and first I wanted to share just some of the footage that I had of EVGA test setup because they did have some clear cameras there and they were doing actual visual thermal load testing basically they had a fourth awayin card set up right next to a for the win two card they had the cameras point at the back both with cards running at the same frequency running the same tests and visual you could you could look at the thermal readouts until that yes the for the win two cards are staying cooler we can assume that is due to the design integration of the additional cooling components in particular when you're looking at the backplate because that is where some of their issues came up with the previous for the win card now I was able to do some load testing myself just some basic tests running Unigine Heaven and I found that with everything at stocked the GP was hitting 71 degrees Celsius the power was a 70 degrees Celsius memory was about 72 degrees Celsius and those are fluctuating within a few degrees of of each other but if you look at the new EB GX EVGA precision x OC software and they've delivered us an early version of it here you can immediately see the difference in that you have GPU temp power temp and memory temp listed right there they've also put little checkboxes will not check boxes but color boxes right next to them and that is because you can control these temperatures by simply going well as long as you get into the advanced functions which I've completely forgotten how to get to now here's that fan curve I believe they need to update this because the drop down isn't working properly to select either one but here's where you would be able to select either fan and control it again we're working with the fairly early revision of the software and then here in the Advanced tab section you can see that you can control still the appearance LED and they it should add some more versions to this I think I like demo one it's usually let it go with thermal LED right here though is what you have some additional control over as well so the thermal LEDs are three separate LEDs that they've integrated onto the cooler they're all labeled GP and M so you have one for G for GPU p for power M for memory so I started off having it set to follow batch color so it just means it will set it up and match with the colors that the rest of the RGB LEDs are showing if you want to be matchy-matchy you can assign it an ambient color so if you just specifically want to tell each of those LEDs what to do you can do that as well or you can do the bit more practical means of showing temperature color here with those so as you can see I set a temperature range for each item and then it will change the color of the LED so you can get a quick visual look at what's going on with your graphics card without even needing to know too much or look at on-screen utilities or something like that so right now it's set to be blue one that's and when it's pretty cool and then once it gets above sixty I'll turn green and then if it hits 83 or more it'll turn red indicating hey it's too hot right now you need to turn up your case fans or something like that beyond that all of the other functions that you might have come to and when it comes to EVGA utility are still there you can still overclock just as you did before you still have access to sensors and actually speaking of sensors you don't still have access you now have access to sensors as well though and here's a quick look at that we can see the memory sensors here these are actually on the front side or the the side of the PCB that the cooler is on and then we also have more sensors that are arrayed on the back side for over here for Prime shock five over here for power that one that's added for GPU and then of course those pre for memory and we can see the individual temperature of all of those if you want overclock and everything like usual you still have all those abilities here the fankerz saving your profiles all that good stuff so this is an enhancement to the precision X I would see utility and it seems to be fairly functional from at least as far as I've played around with it so far speaking more realistically and a little bit more critically though they're not using new GPU they're still GT X 1080 GPUs or 1072 1060 whatever the case may be for the current that you might happen to get so we're not looking at a vast difference or really any even significant difference when it comes to actual performance I did attempt some overclocking with this card and I found that it overclocked just about the same as most of the other GTX 1080s that I've tried I was able to hit two thousand fifty megahertz pretty stable with everything set to stock I cranked the fans up to about 2,000 rpms which did add some noise but brought the temperatures down by about 10 degrees so instead of hovering around 70s low 70s they were hovering around low 60s that did allow me to get about 25 megahertz more when it came to my overclocks about 2075 but again we're not looking at night and day difference you shouldn't be expecting to get these cards and suddenly you're going to get to 3 400 megahertz more unless you're you know doing some really crazy cooling stuff with them or going crazy with the voltage of that kind of thing I didn't go that far when it comes to testing the other thing that you want to bear in mind is that again those other cards are still available so if you're considering an IC X card you should really consider what you want and don't buy it because you're expecting it to be insanely faster than the other 10 on the market buy because you like the technology buy it because you like the concept with keeping better tabs on which different parts of your card are getting hotter or buy it because you like the basic concept that EVGA has come up with here I asked them very specifically do you think Nvidia is going to start taking any of these ideas that you've integrated and possibly integrating them into founders additions or making them standard across cards they couldn't really comment on that but I wouldn't be surprised to see a little bit more active monitoring of the different areas of the graphics card especially if it helps keep things stable by adjusting fan speeds or just more active cooling when it comes to those hot spots like VRMs and memory the other stuff you do you don't always consider the sides of GPU but god I thought is going to do it for this video I hope you've enjoyed it this has been a quick introduction and some brief testing of the icy explore as mentioned I was there with quite a few other tech journalists as well as youtubers so I'm going to actually dig up their stuff that they've been writing as well I'm sure there's more testing that's been going on besides just what I've gone over so I'll post links to their contents in the description down below and that I am planning on using this ITX base EVGA gtx 1080 for the win 2 in my February build so stay tuned for that too and I'll be doing some additional testing with it so if you have any ideas specific things you want to see me work out please leave those comments down in the comment section below thank you as always for watching this video and we'll see you next time