If you happen to be as foolish as I am and give in to the devil on your shoulder to upgrade a pair of the same cards from pascal then I’ll be offering up some food for thought. Whether it’s worth it is of course always subjective. Some will submit that it’s worthless because nothing will use it or their GTX 460 works just fine. That’s not what this is about.
The obvious is this is not a bargain basement venture. These cards are expensive thanks to crypto miners. I paid just over half as much for my 1080Tis that are outrageously priced now too. A lot of price gouging going on with these cards at some sources going well over MSRP. For the record here these were purchased from the egg for $1399 each, the lowest I have seen. Some butt fleas are $1800+. *The premium is already bad enough, don’t need serious gouging going on with it. *These Strix cards are $200 more than the Nvidia FE that can be bought *directly from Nvidia for $1199. *So needless to say the price point is enough to turn back the squeamish.*
Firstly these puppies DRAW A LOT of POWER! *I haven’t graphed it yet but my 1500W (not kVA) online dual conversion UPS for the first time heated up, fans went to jet engine levels*and I looked The display and saw 1200 watts output! *This is of course the entire load with CPU lightly loaded. In the coming weeks I’ll attempt to retrieve a few of my UPS logs to see what’s what.*
With power comes heat. If you intend to run even one of these on air make sure you have beyond excellent air flow. The ENORMOUS heat sinks may pull the heat off the GPU but it just dumps it in your case. Enough so that it raised the temp of my coolant by 4C and it was still climbing before I was like why are my fans ramping up when these aren’t under water yet. So for now when I’m loading them the case door is open. With 4 slot spacing the top card starves for air and becomes too hot to touch the back plate. I could have made a grilled cheese sandwich on it. The specs say 2.7 slots but they may as well just concede to 3 slots because the PCIE slot that is available with 2 slots is completely inaccessible. *By far the largest hestsinks on a GPU I’ve ever seen. I’ll post up pics in an update comparing to the Strix 1080Ti O11G.
Power limit is very real and you will hit it before you hit what these cards are capable of. *I’ve gotten better results with lower Vcore so far just because thats keeping me out of power limit. My guess it this is to keep the heat at bay. *On a cold start I’ve gotten 2.1GHz without throttling but it’s short lived. An honest 2050 though. Which where I am right now on air is +150 core and +300 VRAM, no more than 50% on the Vcore and power limit to max.**
With the cons out of the way these cards provide some impressive results. I’ve bested all my marks and the 4 spot on Realbench. I’ll be posting up more later with some results once I get them under water. *Right now the biggest take away is if you want to try 2 of these make sure you have a power supply big enough. Like 1500W minimum as 1200 won’t cut it. *And if you are thinking about doing it on air.......DON’T!!! Biggest problem is with 4 slot spacing (only a handful of cards can offer more) there is just not enough air getting to the top card even in open air.*
One more point to make for this post, more posts to follow, these cards are saturating Gen 3.0 PCIEX8 bandwidth which up to pascal just didn’t happen. It’s not by a lot but if you don’t have a 16X slot for each card *expect to lose 5% on high workloads like 4K and higher. Doesnt matter for 1080 and about 3% on 2K.*
Look at these honking things. Don’t mind the temp bypass.
***
The obvious is this is not a bargain basement venture. These cards are expensive thanks to crypto miners. I paid just over half as much for my 1080Tis that are outrageously priced now too. A lot of price gouging going on with these cards at some sources going well over MSRP. For the record here these were purchased from the egg for $1399 each, the lowest I have seen. Some butt fleas are $1800+. *The premium is already bad enough, don’t need serious gouging going on with it. *These Strix cards are $200 more than the Nvidia FE that can be bought *directly from Nvidia for $1199. *So needless to say the price point is enough to turn back the squeamish.*
Firstly these puppies DRAW A LOT of POWER! *I haven’t graphed it yet but my 1500W (not kVA) online dual conversion UPS for the first time heated up, fans went to jet engine levels*and I looked The display and saw 1200 watts output! *This is of course the entire load with CPU lightly loaded. In the coming weeks I’ll attempt to retrieve a few of my UPS logs to see what’s what.*
With power comes heat. If you intend to run even one of these on air make sure you have beyond excellent air flow. The ENORMOUS heat sinks may pull the heat off the GPU but it just dumps it in your case. Enough so that it raised the temp of my coolant by 4C and it was still climbing before I was like why are my fans ramping up when these aren’t under water yet. So for now when I’m loading them the case door is open. With 4 slot spacing the top card starves for air and becomes too hot to touch the back plate. I could have made a grilled cheese sandwich on it. The specs say 2.7 slots but they may as well just concede to 3 slots because the PCIE slot that is available with 2 slots is completely inaccessible. *By far the largest hestsinks on a GPU I’ve ever seen. I’ll post up pics in an update comparing to the Strix 1080Ti O11G.
Power limit is very real and you will hit it before you hit what these cards are capable of. *I’ve gotten better results with lower Vcore so far just because thats keeping me out of power limit. My guess it this is to keep the heat at bay. *On a cold start I’ve gotten 2.1GHz without throttling but it’s short lived. An honest 2050 though. Which where I am right now on air is +150 core and +300 VRAM, no more than 50% on the Vcore and power limit to max.**
With the cons out of the way these cards provide some impressive results. I’ve bested all my marks and the 4 spot on Realbench. I’ll be posting up more later with some results once I get them under water. *Right now the biggest take away is if you want to try 2 of these make sure you have a power supply big enough. Like 1500W minimum as 1200 won’t cut it. *And if you are thinking about doing it on air.......DON’T!!! Biggest problem is with 4 slot spacing (only a handful of cards can offer more) there is just not enough air getting to the top card even in open air.*
One more point to make for this post, more posts to follow, these cards are saturating Gen 3.0 PCIEX8 bandwidth which up to pascal just didn’t happen. It’s not by a lot but if you don’t have a 16X slot for each card *expect to lose 5% on high workloads like 4K and higher. Doesnt matter for 1080 and about 3% on 2K.*
Look at these honking things. Don’t mind the temp bypass.
***
Raja@ASUS wrote:
That was was for the Matrix card, Justin. The integrated aio needs that space. We use the same PCB on Strix and Matrix cards because it allows us to bin a wider pool of chips.
Fwiw, EK has been in contact with me regarding 2080 block samples, so I think the Feb date I was given is accurate.
Thanks for the info. I just wish the Matrix would have had a different concept. AIO is great Im sure it offers better thermal performance in an open test bed or a build like a Thermaltake Core P5, it will pull the heat off in a more expeditious fashion but in an enclosed case that heat gets dumped and recycled right back into the inlet. I have heat issue with 20 fans and two 2080Tis in a massive case and have to open the door or it will make my 2 liter capacity loop temps rise because its pulling that hot air through my rads heating it up. Who needs a space heater when these do quite well. I miss the old days when air cooled GPUs had full cover shrouds and dumped the heat out the back somewhat like the turbo does.
Im not overly optimistic on deliver time of the EK blocks. They keep pushing the release time back. In December it was Mid January. Well now that mid January has come and gone its mid February. Watercool wont respond to any inquires and their website says available January 2019 that has a week left. My beard is getting long and Im afraid by the time a decent card get released Ill be looking like this......sitting at my PC with a single back up 1080, looking at $3000 worth of GPU hardware and listing to Eric Clapton Tears in heaven......
Following the same old time schedule its t-minus about 8 months until the 3080 cards will be announced.
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I have issues keeping up with one 3440x1440 panel! Its balls fast though!!!
On a new note I can say enough good things about the customer support reps at Performance PC's. They carry a lot of specialty items in the US that you cant get anywhere else without going outside of the country. I presented them with all that Ive presented here and they were as dumbfounded as I was. They are already on Barrows backside and have arranged for them to have these blocks for breakfast. I spent the better part of the morning explaining and detailing to multiple people in conference with Barrow. In the end I dont have to eat these blocks and Barrow is at least aware of the issue with great detail. Whether or not they decide to fix it is a different story. The blocks may be usable on 2080 (not ti because of the incorrectly modified mosfet portion that only applies to the ti cards) cards with thicker thermal pads but they will not support Nvlink as you cant get the bridge on.
My hats off to performance PCs!!
On a new note I can say enough good things about the customer support reps at Performance PC's. They carry a lot of specialty items in the US that you cant get anywhere else without going outside of the country. I presented them with all that Ive presented here and they were as dumbfounded as I was. They are already on Barrows backside and have arranged for them to have these blocks for breakfast. I spent the better part of the morning explaining and detailing to multiple people in conference with Barrow. In the end I dont have to eat these blocks and Barrow is at least aware of the issue with great detail. Whether or not they decide to fix it is a different story. The blocks may be usable on 2080 (not ti because of the incorrectly modified mosfet portion that only applies to the ti cards) cards with thicker thermal pads but they will not support Nvlink as you cant get the bridge on.
My hats off to performance PCs!!
I sent my second 2080Ti back as I wasn't making real use of it with one 3440 panel. Three of them is a truly monstrous pixel count. Scaling in certain DX12 titles on RTX is very impressive, though.
Keep in mind this is with SMAA X4 which is massively GPU intensive (1440p)
Keep in mind this is with SMAA X4 which is massively GPU intensive (1440p)
I'll be running both of mine. Maybe could get by with one but two will have less of a load and in a year I wont be regretting not getting two. Nvidia did shy away from SLI for a bit, not stopping it, just not aggressively supporting it. Thats changed and they are back on it however not past two cards. No titles make use of more than two and only benchmarks have more than two supported. So in essence the days of quad SLI are gone unless someone wants to dump $10K on 4X RTX titans to get top dog on 3D marks.
Now Im all antsy as Phanteks cards are on the shelves and i have a pair on the way so I can finish this build. Should have known better with the barrow blocks. They have a few things that are OK. Im liking the flowmeter. bought some G 1/4 fittings in the past and they are junk IMO. Once all this is done Ill probably get an itch to add a chiller but thats not going to be an easy bill to fill. Each GPU puts out like 380 watts each add that much more or close to it for an OC'd 9940X and nothing on the market I can find can handle it. 800W is about as high as I have seen. Good thing is in the summer I put a window AC in the window right behind my rig. Duct that puppy up to the back of the case if I have to!! LOL
http://www.phanteks.com/PH-GB2080TiAS.html
Now Im all antsy as Phanteks cards are on the shelves and i have a pair on the way so I can finish this build. Should have known better with the barrow blocks. They have a few things that are OK. Im liking the flowmeter. bought some G 1/4 fittings in the past and they are junk IMO. Once all this is done Ill probably get an itch to add a chiller but thats not going to be an easy bill to fill. Each GPU puts out like 380 watts each add that much more or close to it for an OC'd 9940X and nothing on the market I can find can handle it. 800W is about as high as I have seen. Good thing is in the summer I put a window AC in the window right behind my rig. Duct that puppy up to the back of the case if I have to!! LOL
http://www.phanteks.com/PH-GB2080TiAS.html
