Hardware Review: EVGA Geforce GTX 1080 SC2 - iCX is the Real Deal a Hardware Reviews at MMORPG.com

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Hardware Review: EVGA Geforce GTX 1080 SC2 - iCX is the Real Deal a Hardware Reviews at MMORPG.com

EVGA recently refreshed their line of GTX 1080 video cards with their brand new and innovative iCX cooling solution. Do nine thermal sensors and dual fan control set it apart from the pack? We went hands on to find out for ourselves, and we’ve got good news. Read on for our full review of EVGA’s new GTX 1080 SuperClocked 2 graphics card.

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Forgrimm

Just curious, what are the specs for the rest of the system that you used for testing?

GameByNight

Thank you for asking this! The system used includes:

- i7-7700k at 4.2GHz
- CoolerMaster Hyper N520 CPU Cooler
- 16GB DDR4 3200MHz Memory
- MSI Z270 Gaming M7 Mainboard
- Three standard 7200RPM mechanical HDDs (No SSDs... yet!)
- Six fans providing positive pressure, with one blowing on the GPU from the side panel

Forgrimm

GameByNight said:

Thank you for asking this! The system used includes:



- i7-7700k at 4.2GHz

- CoolerMaster Hyper N520 CPU Cooler

- 16GB DDR4 3200MHz Memory

- MSI Z270 Gaming M7 Mainboard

- Three standard 7200RPM mechanical HDDs (No SSDs... yet!)

- Six fans providing positive pressure, with one blowing on the GPU from the side panel

Cool, thanks for the info. When you mentioned that the system broke a sweat when running ME:A at 4k, I was wondering if there might be some other bottleneck besides the gfx card, but it definitely doesn't look that way, that's a pretty beefy system.

Ozmodan

You know what happens to cards like this that are way overclocked.  All your money goes poof when they burn out and burn out they will.  

If you need the GPU power get a 1080 TI.

GameByNight

Thanks, Torval. I appreciate the feedback :-D About the comparisons, I would love to do that. It's actually my hope, but it's much more difficult for us since we're not a tech specific site. One of my goals is to be able to build a data set so we can provide these kinds of comparisons. It's just going to take a lot to get to that point. I'm keeping things static on the hope that our next GFX card will be the 1080ti and we'll have a direct performance comparison.

JeroKane

Ozmodan said:

You know what happens to cards like this that are way overclocked.  All your money goes poof when they burn out and burn out they will.  

If you need the GPU power get a 1080 TI.

I agree. To be able to safely overclock at those Levels you need to invest in some serious watercooling and when you factor in the cost of such watercooling system, you can just as well buy the 1080 outright and be done with it and run everything at safe Levels and have a system that will last you a couple years, instead of burning out in a year.

Alverant

GameByNight said:

Thank you for asking this! The system used includes:

- i7-7700k at 4.2GHz
- CoolerMaster Hyper N520 CPU Cooler
- 16GB DDR4 3200MHz Memory
- MSI Z270 Gaming M7 Mainboard
- Three standard 7200RPM mechanical HDDs (No SSDs... yet!)
- Six fans providing positive pressure, with one blowing on the GPU from the side panel

Ohhhh Nice rig. I'll have to note your components when I build my next computer.

(I'm still wary of SSDs given their lifespan. My current computer was built in 2009, maybe 2008 whenever Windows 7 came out. It's still running fine except for the graphics card which needed replacing last year.)

Wizardry

Although this is a nice touch to lower temps,it is the drivers that separate the cards.
Drivers is a very tough area to prove anything,you have to basically decide what card works best for your situation and how do you know that without first buying it?

Then we have to look at cooling.Why is it important,to overclock?How important is o/c ing,how much life do you want to get out of your card?I think if we are talking about people going to the extremes,they likely buy a new one every year or 2,so in that case,but the best bang for buck and not worry about cooling or over clocking.

My PC finally bit the dust,so i have been using a very old notebook but it still does the job.So unless people are playing 5 instances of a high end game at once,almost anything midrange should easily suffice.

Nemesis7884

i'd rather want a test for the gtx 1080 ti version... im very interested especially in ti variants that only require 2 slots space that fit in my mini itx case