EVGA's New iCX Range: NVIDIA GPUs with More Control for Cooling

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• MrSpadge - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  Overclock with a gpu clock offset and lower the power / temperature target to get about similar performance at lower power consumption / heat / stress / cost. Far more efficient than simply underclocking the GPU.

• BrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link

  Meh effort, thinking...not worth it for a computer.

• Achaios - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  EVGA just does it right everytime, except for their latest debacle.
  
  Willing to bet one month's pay that the clown responsible for the fiasco with ACX 3.0 has been fired, unless ofc it was the CEO himself who was "cutting c0rner$".
  
  I've listened to JAYZ TWO CENTS' version of the whole affair, and as he is a known EVGA tool, I think that the order to "cut corners" on the ACX 3.0 1080's came from the upper echelons of EVGA, as the CEO, who met with JAYZ, told him "Jay, we screwed up".
  
  Anyone who is experienced with upper echelons of management in corporations will tell you that when the CEO says "we screwed up" then the fail is most probably his, b/c if it was the fail of someone else down the food chain he would have said "my engineers screwed up" or the "superintendent engineer screwed up" or simply, "we are restructuring our tech department".
  
  So, I am hoping the CEO of EVGA learned his lesson.

• BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  A good leader owns the failures of her people as her own and credits them individually for their successes. Maybe "we screwed up" means, "I'm accepting responsiblity for this problem and I won't assign blame publically to a particular department in my company."

• JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  I think you failed to realize that ACX 3.0 was another revision to try to capture a larger audience by redesigning the appeal of the card's aesthetics. By comparison, ACX 2.0 cards looked very "vanilla" in a crowd of "gamer pleasing designs" (take that with a grain of salt, as I thought the ACX 2.0 was the best of the bunch, second only to the Nvidia OEM blower shroud, visually).
  
  The reason the VRMs got hot is because, technically, backplates actually restrict cooling performance to modules on the back of the GPU. Despite the aluminum shroud being metal, and therefore conductive of heat, the backplate just traps the heat between the card's PCB and the backplate.
  
  The redesigned ACX 3.0 backplates have very little ventilation compared to the perforated ACX 2.0 backplates (which seldomly sold with the card, they were sold aftermarket for most ACX 2.0 GPUs for ~$20, this was a business decision justified by the engineering team knowing no backplate had better performance, not the marketing team trying to win customers over with a shiny backplate on each GPU).
  
  Compare the perforation:
  ACX 2.0 GTX 980 Ti: http://www.itrw-pc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/...
  ACX 3.0 GTX 1070: https://content.hwigroup.net/images/products_xl/35...
  
  The problem with ACX 3.0 was that the marketing team led the decision of including backplates by default, thinking that any degraded performance shouldn't be detrimental to the health of the card, well, they were wrong. To alleviate the situation they needed to send an optional recall or for users who opt to keep their cards, instructions and thermal pads to better interface PCB chips on the back of the card to thermally transfer excess heat to the backplate. (Alternatively, you can just remove the backplate and all is OK, too.)
  
  It's a classic case of function vs form. In ACX 2.0, function led over form. And in ACX 3.0's offering, they decided to go with form (aesthetics) over function, and as a result ACX 3.0 GPUs began encountering failures.

• JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  In other words, you're wrong to point the blame at the engineers. They clearly knew what they were doing with ACX 2.0. The engineers weren't making the final design decision though, and using them as a scapegoat for the failures of ACX 3.0 shows that you're failing to grasp the entire picture of what happened.

• blzd - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link

  Didn't the EVGA 900 series backplate have thermal pads as well? They should also help with graphics card sagging in the PCIe slot.

• JoeyJoJo123 - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link

  Yes, GTX 900 series backplates which were sold separately did include thermal pads.
  
  The GTX 1000 series backplates which were included by default had little perforation and no thermal pads.
  
  The inclusion/exclusion of thermal pads isn't necessarily important though. A GPU with backplate + thermal pads still, on average, performs a bit worse than or equal to a GPU with no backplate covering the backside VRMs.
  
  So while the GTX 1000 EVGA cards got bad flak for killing GPUs, a viable solution that didn't require any RMA or anything back from EVGA was just removing the backplate, and that was it. 2 generations of GPUs ago, GPUs commonly sold _without_ backplates and didn't encounter VRM overheating issues. This was the norm.
  
  The addition of cosmetic backplates have resulted in worse temperatures in general for components on the back of the GPU PCB.

• SeeManRun - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  I won't trade in due to the reduced speed. They downclocked the card to save heat by over 150 mhz. I will keep my card with the ACX 3.0 cooler and unmodified bios!

• Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

  Never trust EVGA with their cooling bullshit. I should know, I`ve bought their 980.