6 REALLY UNUSUAL VIDEO CARDS!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,365 words · ~6 min read
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you know I'd forgive you for thinking video cards these days are all such
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conformists plastic shrouds everywhere two to six heat pipes your choice of
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blower or two to three fans and that's
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it where has the style gone to China
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apparently with some help from our friends at NVIDIA we Tracked Down the
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five most mold-breaking graphics cards of the current generation many of which
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are aren't available in North America at
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all for your viewing perhaps gawking
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even
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pleasure cooler Master's 25th
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anniversary edition Cosmos 2 features a
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unique dual curved tempered glass side
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panel check it out now at the link below
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okay so some of these cards are actually fairly well known by now and pallet Colm
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X GTX 1050 TI is one of them it was
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first announced back in February of this year and sports no fan whatsoever just a
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rather sizable heat sink and two lengthy
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heat pipes that means that case clearance might be an issue if you
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decide to pick one of these up since from the card's Edge to the end of the
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Heat hpe we measured 13 and A3 CM not a
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problem for wider desktop cases like a defin R5 but definitely a consideration
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for a home theater PC and we have another GTX 1050 TI too this one's from
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MSI and it's got the same specs but a pretty different approach while it also
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Sports a dual slot design with roughly the same overall length if you count the
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cooler its width is much less and the
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card itself self is half height so as
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you might expect it comes with a lowprofile bracket out of the box which
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means it's a viable option for a cheap 2u video transcoding box or one of those
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slim PCS that were so popular a couple of years ago it's twin fan design means
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that it'll generate some noise but we shouldn't actually see any thermal
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throttling and in our testing these two
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were actually neck and neck the whole time which really shouldn't come as that
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much of a surp priz given that they're otherwise identical but what did blow us
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away is that pallet comx actually ran
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slightly cooler than the lowprofile actively cooled MSI and this is in a
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closed case working our way up the
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ladder this one should be very exciting to small form factor enthusiasts we've
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got the GTX 1070 Katana from Galax while
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not appreciably longer than a Founders Edition GTX 1070 the katana takes up
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only a single slot thanks to its heavy
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use of copper and aluminum to make the whole shroud part of the cooling setup
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it's got a single blower fan to exhaust case out these tiny holes in the rear
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iio and also just out into your case and
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they even managed impressively to include three outputs meaning you're not
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losing out as far as connectivity goes all this and without a back plate but
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how does it measure up performance-wise well shockingly it's actually right up
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there with our Founders Edition though The Thermals leave a lot to be desired
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and it screamed like we were smashing its toes with a hammer the whole time
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this card is definitely not one that you'd want to use in a case that doesn't
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have some sound isolation or really at all unless you really need a single slot
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card next up then is a pair of freaking
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heavy GTX 1080s from Ino 3D and colorful
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and I do mean pair because these cards
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are strikingly similar with the in3d I
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chill and Hercules airboss Behemoth whatever it's
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called sporting not one not two not
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three but four fans for um reasons I
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guess but hey maybe with the 150 MHz
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Factory overclock they're on to something and finally the RGB ey chill
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logo indicates GPU load automatically which is kind of cool even though we
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would prefer Direct Control it's colorful twin here the iigame xtop has a
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distinctive feature of its own check this
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out it's got a turbo button ah that
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brings me back to a simpler time when PCS were beige and Windows was up to
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version 95 anyway this card comes in a surprisingly
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well-written if somewhat rambling box with no specs whatsoever we hit up the
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website and whoa the website is coming
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to hit us a surprise that sounds painful
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let's see what else we got here RGB Lighting on the logo and uh oh here we
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go the turbo button actually boost the clock speed by about 100 MHz neat I'm
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not sure though why you wouldn't run it that way all the time because as for
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performance it still actually fell little bit behind the Ino 3D eye chill
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which manag better numbers across the board clearly that fourth fan is uh
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working wonders finally our craziest card yet
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the 1080 TI based colorful AME wow this
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thing weighs a lot Vulcan X and Holy
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balls is that a three slot card okay
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technically no because it doesn't have more IO over there but the cooler does
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definitely cover up the slot directly underneath so like the xtop the Vulcan X
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comes with a turbo button that bumps the Boost clock to 2 GHz then aside from
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some gamery fans we've got six heat pipes uh connected to two heat sinks
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which on its own would be impressive but what is that on the side next to the
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GeForce logo that's a screen baby a
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pretty crappy old school LCD screen but a screen nonetheless does your graphics
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card show fans speed core temperature
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core frequency and memory usage conveniently on a little hardto read
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display inside your Tower instead of in a sensible software interface no well
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neither does ours because there's no software in the box and none on the
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English version of the website I still got to give them points for originality though anyway how much does a 2 GHz
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boost get you over a regular 108ti well looks like significant gains
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in synthetics and real world numbers a couple frames higher than our Founders
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Edition and to its credit by the way it even when overclocked stayed very very
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cool though with a heat sink this big that shouldn't exactly be a shock so
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there you have it six totally non-mainstream graphics card designs
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some are similar to ones that were once popular like low profile single slot or
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passive but with more performance than we've ever seen in these form factors
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before While others take more let's say dramatic approaches so would you buy any
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of these Hot Topic versions of graphics
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cards or would you rather just stick with comfortable Conformity let us know
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today so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video hit that button but
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