EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 review: A ferocious graphics card with a radical cooler - danielinving1973

At a Glance

Good's Rating

Pros

Incredible gambling execution, flatbottomed at 4K
EVGA's iCX temperature reduction keeps temperatures and noise contralto
Small than otherwise custom GTX 1080 Ti cards

Cons

Winding-sheet design may be discordant

Our Finding of fact

The GTX 1080 Ti SC2 uses EVGA's revolutionary iCX cooling technology to form the most potent consumer art card in the world even better. It's cool, quiet, and powerful.

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Of all time since the monstrous $700 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti launched, the world's been waiting to see what this bestial GPU was capable of in the hands of Nvidia's hardware partners. The Founders Edition delivered maledict most inflexible 60-fps performance at 4K resolution with everything cranked to 11, and that was with a lowly reference cooler and stock clock speeds. How far tail end factory-overclocked versions with potent custom cooling solutions go?

Asymptomatic, for the for the first time sentence ever, a graphics card is so curse fast that it managed to for the most part crusade a courageous's bottleneck off of the GPU and onto the CPU in PCWorld's ferocious testing PC—patc lengthways 15 degrees or more ice chest than the Founders Variation.

And the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 ($720 preorder connected Amazon) isn't flatbottom EVGA's quickest custom GTX 1080 Titanium.

Blamed.

Meet the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2

Before we dive into the customizations EVGA made to the SC2, Hera's a refresher connected the GTX 1080 Ti's default option subject specs, built around the full-fat interlingual rendition of Nvidia's GP102 graphics central processor.

The senior difference under the hood of EVGA's card is the GPU clock speed. The GTX 1080 Ti SC2 hums along at a 1,556MHz base clock and 1,670MHz boost clock. That's a healthy 88MHz bound over the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition boost clock—heck, the EVGA card's base of operations time is a mere 26MHz away from the neckcloth version's boost time. The numbers game aren't American Samoa concrete as they seem, however, as the GTX 1080 Ti regularly surpasses its rated boost clock anyway. Before playacting any additive overclocking, we saw EVGA's card hit time speeds adequate to 1,850MHz in many games, dependent on what was occurrence on-screen.

The memory's untouched compared to the reference version, with a borderline excessive 11GB of GDDR5X of onboard Jampack. The cooling solvent is anything just.

You'll notice EVGA's new shroud design first. With the GTX 1080 Ti lineup, the company's ditched the solid exterior recovered in its customized GTX 1080 models for a porous new aesthetic that shows the strapping heatsink lurking underneath. The look's been somewhat dissentious in forums but I dig it, not least of which because it shows the on-key star of the show here: EVGA's ambitious iCX chilling apparatus.

We went hands-happening with EVGA's revolutionist iCX when it debuted in the GTX 1080 FTW2 before this year, and it's worth highlighting once again. Graphics cards feature traditionally only featured a single temperature sensor, monitoring the GPU processor itself. EVGA's iCX loads the bill with not one, not ii, but nine additional sensors that also monitors the rear of the GPU, the aboard memory modules, and the power controllers. Well-nigh every aspect of your graphics card is tracked.

asynchronous cooling — How EVGA's iCX cooling engineering science works.

Just iCX does more than simply racecourse temperatures. It uses that comprehensive information to control the speeds of the treble fans severally, with the leftmost fan responding to the GPU temperature, and the right hand-side fan adjusting speeds to keep the computer storage and PWMs cold. If the memory's warming up rapidly only the GPU itself is staying relatively cool, as can happen with the Furmark accent test, the dedicated GPU fan maintains a slower, quieter speed, while the store fan ramps up.

vrm heatpipe sc2 — The copper VRM heatpipe integrated in the GTX 1080 Ti's redesigned baseplate.

EVGA's tweaked the VRM heatpipe design on iCX-helmeted GTX 1080 Ti cards also, to help keep temperatures regular lower.

You can monitor your temperatures sensor-aside-sensor in EVGA's Preciseness XOC software, or just by glancing at the graphics card in your case. Three RGB lights above the EVGA GTX 1080 Te SC2's logotype on the card's butt on indicate how hot your GPU, PWMs, and memory are, respectively. A components heat up, the individual lights interchange colourize (non that you'll have to worry about it much with this card). Precision XOC lets you tailor-make the colors of the EVGA logo As well atomic number 3 the RGB indicators.

evga gtx 1080 ti sc2 1 — The colored lights over the "1080" show how hot your computer hardware's running game.

It feels like the future of chilling, and it's stunningly effective in practice. IT's nice seeing RGB lights being used to practical effects, as well. Most custom GTX 1080 Ti cards released up to now have used thicker 2.5- or 3-slot designs to keep the GPU tamed, but EVGA's card sticks to a conventional 2-slot size, so it'll exist interesting to see how iCX holds up in games.

Every bit far atomic number 3 the relaxation of the card goes, the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 features a sturdy backplate, arsenic you'd expect in a nontextual matter card this pricey. Despite its higher clock speeds, the card placid harbors the identical 250-W TDP as the Founders Edition, and the same 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors. EVGA's internal 7+2 mogul phases leave help you push the GPU to even quicker speeds.

There's one final tweak of Federal Reserve note. While Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition ditched the DVI-D port to growth cooling piece sticking to the one soma factor As the GTX 1080 Founders Variation, EVGA's robust cooling system allows the company to return the legacy, yet well-loved connector to its rightful place on the rear of the card.

Enough talking. Let's benchmark this badass. You'atomic number 75 passing to want to read the results for warmth and Ashes of the Singularity.

Next page: System configuration, benchmarks begin

Our examination organization, Division benchmarks

We tested EVGA's GTX 1080 Ti SC2 on PCWorld's dedicated graphics card bench mark system. Our testbed's loaded with high-end components to avert bottlenecks in other parts of the system and establish unchained graphics performance. Leastways, theoretically. We'll mystify thereto later.

Intel's Core i7-5960X with a Corsair Hydro Series H100i closed-loop body of water cooler ($120 on Amazon).
An Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard ($230 on Virago for an updated version).
Corsair's Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory ($130 on Amazon River), and 1,200-watt AX1200i power supply ($310 on Amazon).
A 480GB Intel 730 series SSD ($280 on Amazon River).
Phanteks' Enthoo Evolv ATX case ($190 on Amazon).
Windows 10 Affirmative ($158 on Amazon).

Naturally, we'Re comparing the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 against Nvidia's GTX 1080 Te Founders Variation ($700 on Amazon). We already have it away that the GTX 1080 Ti stomps all rivals, but we're also including benchmarks from the Founders Edition GTX 1080 ($500 on Amazon) and GTX 1070 ($380 on Amazon) for reference. AMD hasn't had a emulous enthusiast-class graphics card since Nvidia's GTX 10-series launched in mid-2016, and it won't until Radeon Vega hits the streets sometime earlier the goal of June.

All cards are time-tested with default sports fan profiles and out-of-the-package clock speeds.

Each game's tested using its in-game bench mark at the mentioned graphics presets, with V-sync, frame charge per unit caps, and all GPU vendor-specific technologies—like AMD TressFX, Nvidia GameWorks options, and FreeSync/G-Synchronize—disabled. This board is so powerful that we're limiting our testing to 4K and 2560×1440 resolve.

The Division

The Division, a gorgeous third gear-soul shooter/RPG that mixes elements ofDestinyandGears of War, kicks things off with Ubisoft's new-sprung Anemone quinquefolia engine. We test the game in DirectX 11 mode; The Division recently rolled out an update that adds DirectX 12 support, but the performance is virtually superposable to the DX11 results.

The EVGA card pushes a few more frames per second than the stock GTX 1080 Ti here, with a wider gap as result increases. It pulls ahead by roughly 6.5 percent at 4K, but just 4.5 percentage at 1440p.

Next page: Hitman

Hitman

Hitman's Glacier locomotive historically favored AMD computer hardware. It's no surprise;Hitman's a flagship AMD Gaming Evolved title. That said, GeForce cards certainly don't slouch after recent driver optimizations. We try out in some DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 with SSAO disabled.

The EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2's lead is less Hera, possibly because Hired gun's already pushing out so many frames. We saw rough 3 to 4 percent performance improvements over the GTX 1080 Cordyline terminalis Founders Edition at stock clock speeds—simply a lot of people don't buy a posting like this to follow stock speeds.

Side by side page: Rise of the Tomb Freeboote

Rise of the Grave Raider

WhereasHitmanleans towards Radeon GPUs,Rise of the Tomb Raiderperforms much better on GeForce cards—and it's absolutely gorgeous. We only examine the game's DirectX 11 mood, as DX12 results can be planetary.

Over again, we byword a 3 to 4 percentage betterment across the board departure from the Founders Version to the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2.

Next page: Far Cry Primal

Remote Cry Primal

Cold Cry Centralis another Ubisoft game, only it's powered by a dissimilar engine than The Partitioning—the latest version of the sesquipedalian-running and good-proud Dunia railway locomotive.

Other game, another improvement of a couple of frames per second over the stock GTX 1080 Ti. At 4K/Ultra, the difference is 5.36 per centum.

Next page: Ashes of the Singularity

Ashes of the Singularity

Ashes of the Singularity, running connected Oxide's custom Nitrous engine, was an early standard-toter for DirectX 12, and many months later it'sstill the premier game for seeing what next-gen graphics technologies have to offer. We test the game using the Heights graphics scene, as the wildly strenuous Crazy and Extremum presets aren't reflective of real-world usage scenarios.

Here's where things get really interesting. The EVGA GTX 1080 Si SC2 sees the biggest performance uptick of all the tests in Ashes, pushing come out of the closet frames a full 10 percent faster than the Founders Variant at 4K result. But attend at those 1440p results! They're virtually identical between the two cards, and remained so after several tests.

That's because the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 is so fast, Ashes becomes Central processing unit-bound rather than GPU-bound at 1440p/High—the first meter we've seen a graphics card max out our organization's capabilities. The SC2's unscheduled oomph pushes it over the edge, as confirmed by checking the gamy's deeper prosody, which showed that only if some 5 percentage of heavy- and medium-batch frames were GPU-bound. To cost fair, the 8-core Core i7-5960X in our trial run system runs at modest 3GHz stock speeds, but it's still a milestone. We'll be making some changes shortly to prevent information technology from happening once again.

Next page: Synthetic benchmarks

Synthetics, power, heat, overclocking

We as wel tested the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 and its rivals victimisation 3DMark's highly respected DX11 Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra synthetic benchmarks, as well as 3DMark's Time Spy benchmark, which tests DirectX 12 performance at 2560×1440 resolution.

Everything falls about where you'd expect based on antecedent performance results.

Incoming page: Power and heat

Power

We trial power under charge by plugging the entire system into a Watts Up time, running the intensiveDivision benchmark at 4K resolution, and noting the prime power imbibe. Work-shy magnate is rhythmic after nonmoving on the Windows desktop for three minutes with no supernumerary programs or processes running.

The EVGA GTX 1080 Titanium SC2 only uses a hair Thomas More power than the GTX 1080 Ti Founders Variant, and a key 10W inferior power at idle. That's probably because the double fans along EVGA's card block up spinning when the card isn't under load, whereas the reference example's fan constantly whirs.

Heating system

We test heat during the aforementioned intensiveDivision benchmark at a strenuous 4K resolution, by running SpeedFan in the ground and noting the maximum GPU temperature (in Celsius) once the run for is over.

The EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2's robust iCX cooling solution keeps the GPU a whopping 15 degrees Celsius cooler than the Founders Edition under load, and it girdle far quieter while doing so. It's not just the GPU staying chilly, either: Checks with Precision XOC showed the PWMs and memory continual nice and cool. I was hoping to rip a shot of the card clamor a red RGB indicator Light but couldn't get it to chance below any commonsense circumstances, even after overclocking.

icx temps — Precison XOC's sensor temperature readings while operative our thermal test, a.k.a.The Divisionat 4K repeatedly. (Click to magnify.)

That's using the default fan curved shape, overly. Precision XOC allows you to set a custom-built lover curve, or enable an "invasive" fan curve. The aggressive arc, which I utilised in my overclocking endeavors, is no joke: It kept the overclocked GPU linear between 52 and 59 degrees Celsius in The Division and Ascension of the Tomb Raider even at 4K/Ultra. Air-cooled graphics cards don't get practically colder than that—though the fan make noise generated exploitation that setting is just as militant.

Next page: Overclocking and bottom line

Overclocking

Unfortunately, time constraints prevented me from fine-tuning the perfect overclock with the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2. Without tweaking the power limit—an important bill—I was able-bodied to achieve a +80MHz runner on the card's GPU clocks, which resulted in real clock speeds of 1,910MHz to 1,987MHz in games depending on the resolution and intensity of the scene. Retentivity overclocks hit +300MHz without a hang-up, and could've gone further if I had time to keep stepping up the frequency and checking stability.

Even overclocked, EVGA's aggressive fan curve kept temperatures in the middle- to overflowing-50s, Celsius. The combination of the overclock and using the invasive buff curve as wel didn't employ very much more power than the stock configuration, at 314W instead of 303W.

This hasty overclock added a few many frames' worth of functioning in the handful of games I was fit to test at 4K/Radical.

The redundant oomph provided by the overclock resulted in a 9.9 percent intermediate frame rate increase compared to the stock GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, and to be sure with clock I could've pushed IT even encourage. Non as well shabby.

Oh, and I tested Ashes of the Uniqueness at 1440p with the overclocked EVGA SC2 and byword virtually No difference in performance yet over again. Yep, IT's CPU-bound.

Bottom line

The EVGA GTX 1080 Atomic number 2 SC2 kicks ass.

Sure, it's only an common of 5.7 percent faster than the GTX 1080 Cordyline terminalis Founders Edition retired of the boxful, but even that unostentatious increase is enough to push on The Division and Far Cry Primal to the edge of 60 fps at 4K resolution with all the graphics options cranked to 11—and push Ashes of the Uniqueness into beingness CPU-furled at 1440p. A quick, basic overclock nearly two-fold the operation gain, though overclocking's forever subject to the whims of the Si lottery.

The real star here is EVGA's unique iCX cooling solution. I was a rooter (har har) when EVGA debuted iCX, and the refinements in the GTX 1080 Ti SC2 real make information technology shine. The card runs cool equally a cucumber and tranquil as a mouse with its default sports fan profile, and that's all the more impressive when you consider that the EVGA GTX 1080 Si SC2's a standard 2-one-armed bandit size. Most of the other custom GTX 1080 Ti cards free enlarged to bulkier 2.5- and 3-expansion slot thicknesses to accommodate the heating plant of this potent GPU.

If you're really sounding to crank overclocks as far as possible, you might want to wait for the release of EVGA's flagship GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 flagship, which is also imbued with iCX. That card offers slightly higher out-of-the-clock speeds but really caters to overclockers by swapping out the secondary 6-pin mightiness connector with another 8-pin connector, upgrading the power phases to a 10+2 arrangement, and adding a second BIOS. It costs $30 more, though.

You can't be disappointed with a cool, quiet, eminently configurable graphics card that pushes operation to the literal brink in a game like Ashes, though. The GTX 1080 Ti SC2's performance bump and immensely reinforced cooling solution make it comfortably worth the $20 premium over a Founders Version card. EVGA's card is well the fastest graphics card to ever cross our labs. Don't hesitate to pip out if you'atomic number 75 play at 4K resolution, or 1440p at a up refresh order.

And we won't waffle to upgrade our testing system. Look for a rebuild ahead Radeon Vega lands, complete with a new lineup of game benchmarks.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/406500/evga-gtx-1080-ti-sc2-review-a-ferocious-graphics-card-with-a-radical-cooler.html

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