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 IX 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
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check it out at the link below what the crap is icx technology I
how do I even pronounce that I I6
I6 well whatever evga's marketing team
helpfully describes it as a new and more efficient way to cool with optimized
airf flow fin design which is a good start because an old and less efficient
way to cool with an unoptimized 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 IX relies
on nine discrete thermal sensors to
dramatically expand the card's 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 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 heat SN fins low power fans for additional GPU power
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 back plate a clean industrial aesthetic the
aforementioned perforated heat sink fins and of course icx as a superclocked card
this sits in the middle of evga's lineup with a 100 MHz bump over the reference
design and we'll be running it on our RGB test bench so it's a core
i77700k at both outof the box and
overclocked speeds time for the fuzzy donut of death yes fur marks back and so
are the settings from the back plate benches stock settings save for the
maxed out power and temperature targets the results well that's unsurprisingly
the first interesting aspect of the icx design there are a lot of them for the
GPU it was stable at 68° Centigrade
while the memory came in at 80 and the power delivery hit 81 all of this with
no thermal throttling traditional tools
like ferm Mark's integrated GPU temperature readout would have only
shown us the 68° figure which means that
already icx is doing its job so then we gave it a tidy 100 MHz overclock to both
core and memory keeping in mind of course that the superclock 2 is already
over clocked out of the box and went back to Tim Horton's for another fuzzy
donut and 68° Centigrade on the GPU 80
for the memory and 81 for the power delivery again zero throttling I'm
noticing a pattern here the Super Clock 2 IX is a good card and measures up well
to the aorist that we checked out recently but this sensor Tech just
doesn't really seem to do anything for performance directly 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 airf flow restrictions
in smaller cases could lead to higher
temperatures for the DRM reducing its efficiency hurting performance and
shortening its lifespan so with our
obstruction in the way of this fan we can see some car temperatures Rising
even when the GPU is not being stressed this is a likely scenario in a compact
case and IX ramps the fan accordingly
cool literally in our perfect world
there is still some work to be done here independent control of the fan 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 card's back plate which reached a toasty
74° 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 answers
do you appreciate the extra control let us know in the comments
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