EK Full-Cover water blocks for 1080 Ti AORUS graphics cards
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Enticles
Is there a lot more overclocking headroom for GPU's on liquid cooling than air cooling these days?
my first reaction when seeing this is "oh, awesome" then i thought about how much extra money people are forking out for the AIB partner models of the 1080ti, and the better air cooling that comes with the AIB version of the air cooler.
Just curious, because if the difference is not that much then people would be better off buying founders edition cards and just watercooling those instead!
Agent-A01
No difference in OC ability.
Pascal GPUs all overclock about the same regardless of board quality.
xrodney
It depends, if you are thermally limited or have issues with stability because of heat, then WC can help a lot.
1080ti can hit 1.9+ Ghz on air but often just for short time before starting to throttle with a lot of noise due to fans ramping up.
On a water, the same GPU can continuously hit 2.2+ GHz and stay there with temperature ~50 degrees.
So on water, you get ~20% higher clock, much lower temps, lower consumption (because of lower temps), almost no noise.
The disadvantage of WC is higher maintenance, big initial cost and a slight chance of the leak.
xrodney
The question was not about board quality, but rather WC vs AIR cooling.
AIR cooling in extreme situation is getting noisy and have its limits especially during summer in hot areas or in bad airflow cases.
Agent-A01
My answer was directed to his "is it better off just buying FE and watercooling those instead"
Which the answer is a yes.
PrMinisterGR
Doesn't the addon WC forfeit places like the VRM on board though?
Loophole35
Not with full coverage blocks like EK.
PrMinisterGR
Don't these end up being more expensive than a pre-WC card?
Loophole35
Not if you already have a water loop. But yes if you are starting from the ground up it's a bit more.
Hybrid cooling is a bit different but the VRAM and VRM's are still cooled by a heatsink and fan.
Enticles
the focus of my question was really just on the GPU itself. I was making an assumption that if you're looking at an EK waterblock that you either have a custom watercooling loop or are in the process of spec'ing one out.
perhaps i should have phrased the question like this:
"under a full coverage waterblock, would it be a better choice to get a founders edition card and save the difference on something like the aorus card with a waterblock?"
with all of the improvements AIB partners add on to their GPU's such as better power delivery, 2x8pin vs 1x8pin and 1x6pin, etc. I was wondering if these upgrades really make a difference or if it is really an epeen kind of thing.
Appreciate all the responses, though 🙂
Loophole35
As locked down as Pascal is FE with FCWB is just as good as custom PCB.
Get a FE short the shunt cover with a EK waterblock and se what the silicon lottery gave you.
Agent-A01
FE plus waterblock is much cheaper than any AIB card with pre-installed full cover bloack.
The extra phases, extra 8pin does not matter at all.
FE is already overkill for it.
I got FE + EK block for 740~ so it was well worth it compared to MSI EK edition which would be around 900 total.
EdInk
With all my case and radiator(240mm) fans off, idling/light tasks temps on CPU and GPU are 35-36C. room temp 25C. Only the pump runs at around 15% duty cycle. The silence is golden.
I can have silence without high temps.
xrodney
Unless power delivery is insufficient, the custom board does not make difference.
Only case custom board could make difference is, if it uses better binned GPU.
Other side of the story is that full cover water blocks are usually (with few exceptions) designed for reference boards layout and will likely not fit custom GPUs.
