$h!t Manufacturers Say Ep. 1 - "Backplates Cool Your Video Card"
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,082 words · ~5 min read
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those back plates that you find on some graphics cards are like a bra for your
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graphics card they look sexy and alluring making the reveal of what's
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underneath that much more fun and that sag prevention is a bonus but do they
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help with cooling I mean you can find people asking about this everywhere from
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the Linus techtips Forum to overclock.net to Tom's Hardware to
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evga's own forums Reddit and even super
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user forums they're all asking the same question and the answer has always been
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nope no cooling benefits just Aesthetics
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and rigidity though you'll find the odd mention of protection for the components
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on the back from things like dropped screws abrasion or small water cooling
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mishaps which is valid but not cooling
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right well that's what I thought but orus recently released their GTX 1080
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extreme Edition 8G a beastly looking card with an advanced copper back plate
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cooling they claim that excess heat from your GPU not only gets dissipated by the
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massive cooling module on the front you know the standard graphics card heat
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sink de but also through the backside
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with a ribbed copper plate providing a well-rounded thermal solution for the
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GPU well they've piqued my interest but
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they don't say exactly by how much the advanced copper back plate cooling
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solution will actually reduce temps by
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there is this giant aggro 3 that's just
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chilling on the ground graic of the back plate so I guess we're going to go with
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that welcome to episode one of manufacturer say where we're going to
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test if oris's new solution can stand up to their bold
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claims gfuel is hosting a buy one get one free promotion for their energy
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drink tubs check it out at the link below let's set the playing field this
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is a non- reference NVIDIA GTX 1080 but we'll start with a Founders Edition 1080
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it also has a backplate but doesn't claim that it improves Cooling and
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there's no shiny copper on it just a few weak sauce thermal pads that are
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probably there mostly to make sure that the back plate isn't detrimental to
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cooling I threw it on a test bench and loaded up furmark the fuzzy donut of
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death I left the card at stock settings other than cranking the temp Target up
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to 83° and after letting it burn for about 20 minutes just to be sure it was
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at a stable 79° C all right time to take
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it back off the bench and remove the back plate this is a relatively simple
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process four screws around the GPU two bigger ones near the I/O and then
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there's a ton of tiny little incredibly
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annoying screws
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everywhere be sure to have a magnetic part tray if you don't have one we have
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this handy guide on how to make one out of a dead hard drive because these
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little Devils will run away on you God they are annoying anyways bench time
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again the fuzzy donut is back and the results 79° no change whatsoever this is
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starting to feel like the workshop we even took some shots with our Flur
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thermal camera to give you guys a more complete picture of what's going on but
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in a nutshell the founders Edition card
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well the back plate didn't really help anything but a challenger approaches
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aggressive Ang Les animalistic symbols refined copper metal and Industrial
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styling same process slot it in lock it in place screw it in crank the thermal
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and power limit to Max overclock the core and memory by 100 MHz each apply
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the fuzzy donut and wait 20 minutes results 67° and that's at over 2 GHz on
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the core this is a pretty wicked card it's fast it runs cool I hit a voltage
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limit at that overclock but uh yeah I'm liking it so far but how about that back
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plate well looking at the Flur thermal imaging there is a cold spot right where
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that back plate sits but does that translate to a difference in core
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temperatures time to find out remove the three random screws from the back plate
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then the four ones around the GPU realize that there are more internally
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remove the entire heat sink unplugging all four plugs from the inside and
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undoing two remaining screws find another Power connector behind the back
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back plate for the glowing orus logo try not to break the connector when removing
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it as it's rather fragile attach the cooler again but leave the back plate
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off put it back on the bench and conclusion time 67° that's the result
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67° is not lower than 67° 67° is the
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same damn thing as 67° these results are
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not different the Fleer footage doesn't show the cold spot anymore but as there
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was no improvement the core is not less hot the card is not running any faster
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does the back plate look really cool yep does it cool things maybe maybe the back
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of the PCB but not the GPU or anything else that is going to affect performance
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it's hard with the tools that we have to say whether this is to do with poor
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thermal transfer through the PCB or the thick thermal pad that's on the copper
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plate and the card does perform well so
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we aren't saying not to buy it or anything just brace yourself for
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disappointment if you're a hardcore copper back plates for their GPU cooling
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abilities nerd I guess if that exists
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thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like
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button and consider going down below to click on links to buy stuff or buying a
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shirt which is the same as buying stuff but the stuff could reference graphics
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cards that you saw in this video so that's slightly more specific than what
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I said right before that also watch this video which which is our video
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on my personal rig there we go that video is not up yet but theoretically
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considering it's like almost done editing it will go up before this goes up so hopefully that works out see you
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next time