AIO vs Air Cooled Video Cards... worth the extra cost?

all right so we're gonna talk about graphics cards again things you can't buy i know but they're still fun to play with so we're gonna talk about it anyway um not this one though we've already done a review of this one if you want to check out the geforce rtx 3080i game which was this over extreme over oh advanced there it is um then check out the link down below maybe we'll put a link right here on the screen we already did a review of this but what today's topic is going to kind of be more about is air-cooled graphics cards versus water-cooled graphics cards particularly cards that are using aios because they sent us their latest igame rtx 3080 neptune interesting name neptune which is essentially the same gpu and such with a water cooler on it so we're going to see what kind of gains we pick up we're going to talk about some of the build construction uh while also kind of at the same time doing a little bit of a review of this graphic card the all-new 5000 v mid tower airflow case from corsair features an optimized front panel for maximum ventilation while the integrated cable management and tempered glass side panel means you can show off more of your components and not your cable mess to see the full list of specs and to learn more about the 5000ds flexible fan mounting options perfect for both air cooling and water cooling enthusiasts follow the sponsored link in the description below all right so we'll kind of start off with a little bit of an unboxing type review here of the neptune there's a couple things that already concern me with the image here um we'll take a look at the way that this is built but so it's it's kind of common now for why do they put felt on one side when it's just cheap foam on the other anyway oh that's a 240 thick boy all right so oh another one of our screwdrivers that's where we got that one that we got i like these screwdrivers anyway um where was i talking about things rgb cable water cooled gpu wow it's weighty and that's pretty much all that's in the box there besides the uh oh radiator screws and the bits for the screwdriver everything else is empty it's kind of common now for companies to basically take these acetec type ail coolers and i don't know if this one is specifically acetech but that's what companies have been doing is taking these asitex cpu coolers making adapter plates to mount them to their gpus building shrouds for them because they've learned that with nvidia's gpu boost technology which is the auto overclocking features based on temperatures power draw and current uh boost tables in terms of how far they're allowed to go on frequency they've learned that if you can keep the die cooler you get more performance out of it so here is what the card looks like it's all very floppy it's kind of a it is metal is it no that's plastic it's kind of a gun metal color three eight pin power connectors which is just like the igame advanced and then the back plate not a fan of the big blue neptune on there it's also kind of a machined so it's going to leave skin and behind when you rub it the only reason i even point that out is because that means dust is going to be getting stuck to this as well and then if you want to plug in the rgb for it not a total fan of this either it looks like this plug right here connects to the back of the card i can get it in there story of my life wait a minute is this like a this is a different plug type so phil took the old push harder method i try not to shove things in holes too hard okay i don't want to break things moving on so in terms of the radiator it does look like your very typical square aluminum i do find these these fans kind of fascinating though so they've got this channel along the side of the blade so that means any air that's scooped in can't splash off the side it has to go through uh and then it's a single fan why don't more companies do this why don't they make 240s and 360s like this you just put them in your case and then one wire i think more people should do that before we install it i'm going to talk about something here that's a little bit of a concern to me so here's the pump right here i took the plastic off already um you can see fingerprints really do attract to this not a fan of the design i guess it does have a very like tony stark kind of a look but my concern with this is we're giving direct cooling to the gpu die however there's no fan here to move air across the vrms the power delivery you know the chokes mosfets and memory on the pcb there's other items on the pcb that create a lot of heat that need to be cooled in fact i'm going to show you my kingpin card here which you guys have seen a million times because even though when we apply ln2 directly to the gpu die and it does freeze like the memory stuff around it the vrm on the front and especially the vrms on the back even though they're being like chilled because the cold does move through the board can get so hot it causes crashing even when the gpu die is at like minus 150 degrees celsius in fact this is my 2080 ti kingpin and you can see that it's very dusty oops but one of the things that they've done is they have the block under here but they also have this fan and the heat sinks on here on the power delivery just like i showed you blowing air through the card to air cool the components that still need some cooling but not anything as extreme as water you can see it looks like on the picture right here without taking it apart you just have these long extension tubes that meet up with the pump and it looks like the cool the cold plate does have a heat pipe that's designed to take heat from the memory and moving into there but you can see right here the power delivery is pretty much completely just left to its own devices and the problem with that is with this cover over it like this my fear is that we're going to be trapping the heat in there but we're going to see whether or not it makes a difference in terms of the clock speeds i wish more companies had uh something similar to like how the uh i uh icx works where you can actually see the temperatures of the vrm and stuff on the evga icx cards but they have a patent on that so i guess yeah let's go and install it how does install there we go you're supposed to put the pump higher than the red [Music] that is not that is like the most teetery thing all right so we got the card installed it's got this very arc reactor looking thing there it's not plugged into the argb cable because i only have one header on this motherboard that's plugged into the fans we had to do some uh sleuthing on my old video to find out what our old scores were because of the fact that we only ran it in port royal but what we care about is how this card is comparing to the old card with the same settings and such at least out of the box testing and see how far to overclock the igame advanced air cooled card we were able to get to a 2085 with a plus 150 offset on the core and plus 750 on the memory which is kind of standard the g6x likes to overclock it really does you can go too far though and start to get errors it is error correcting and then when it's correcting errors you get a major drop in fps but it was about 56 degrees under load that is what the button clicked in that's going to give us higher power limits essentially is what that's doing in higher boost stables so this is what the preliminary results look like it's 22c at idle that's because that fan uh the fans on the radiator are running and the pump is going so a lot of times what happens with air-cooled cars too and again this is more of an air cooled versus aio and some of the trade-offs a lot of the air-cooled cars have a zero rpm mode or a zero db mode because they're designed to when they're not under load let the idle temp creep up as high as 50 c which is perfectly fine for the gpu honestly and then have the fans not turning which does a couple of things one makes no noise and two it doesn't add any dust into your gpu that's not necessary adding to some of the clogging of the fins and such as it's turning fans for no reason to keep the idle temps down remember these these gpus are designed to run uh over 95 c before they shut off we already did a video on there like where does it actually shut off where we took a cooler literally off the card and ran it um so 22c at idle is actually pretty good so to keep things as apple's apples as possible as our last test we are on the same test bench and same driver and everything we're going to run heaven extreme tessellation anti-aliasing at 8x um 1440p looping until the gpu cooler has each reached equilibrium which takes longer with water than it does with air to see where won our clock and our temperatures max out first things first though 1995 is where it started and it dropped down to 1980. i think 1995 is going to be well that was a great year that was my sophomore year of high school no um it really was though but when it comes to um the boost bins i don't think they'll go higher than 1995 or maybe 2010 because remember they're 15 megahertz increments all right so it looks like we topped out at about 46.47 it's going back and forth between that one degree depending on the load of the particular scene it dropped down to 1965 megahertz and that's going to be directly related between there's 1950 depending on what the boost table and temperature intersect is there's two different lines there as the temp goes up the frequency goes down and there's the intersect that does that right as you move the charts around and that's where it ended up let's talk about the power limit for a second this is something a lot of people misunderstand one your graphics card is not limited by your power supply people seem to think power limit indicates the amount of power available to it through the power supply that's not the case that's the amount of power it's allowed to draw i've seen some people say but why does this card go to 8 and this card goes to 15 this is clearly a better card that's not the case because it's gonna be based on a scale of one hundred percent and one hundred percent on one card might be lower than another card 320 is the spec a lot of these custom cards especially water cooled cards will have something like 350 be the new base or 340 or 345 with an extra 15 watts that's a hundred and then you're adding eight percent of that so eight percent of 320 watts is less than eight percent of 340 watts that's how the math works um we also just hit 48c right there but that's fine i have gone ahead and just maxed out our power limit and at 108 and you can see nothing changed on our core frequency and that's because again the temperature is what's uh truly controlling right now how far we are able to allow the frequency to go in i think it's going to crash at 245. oh so 2205 it crashed i mean i can't be upset about that so we're going to leave it at 200. so it looks like right around 21.75 is where it crashes we've we've raised about three degrees up to 52 which is why we dropped down to 2145 now but we're at plus 1100 on the memory 12566 is what we had with the igame card so we are what about almost 400 math see what our temps got up to during that test our temps maxed out at 47 and it was still climbing so it probably would still hit the 50s gp usage was exactly at 100 and then our core clock was bouncing between 21.75 and 21.45 not bad you can see right there that our temperatures were a little lower than the air cooled card and uh our clocks were a little bit higher which made up for the you know nearly 400 points of difference here now let's go ahead and uh change out those fans and see if we can't get that 12939 to maybe hit 13 000 which will make this our fastest 3080 that we have so i just took the fans off it's kind of interesting to me that i ended up feeling like they're terrible fans because they're made by cooler master i'm not saying cooler master makes terrible fans i'm just a little bit more surprised that they weren't better all right so i went ahead and pulled out all the stops and i pulled out my corsair ml 120 fans these are maglev high rpm fans you can even hear it the other fans couldn't hear at all so i just want to see now what our improvement is going to be by just letting this radiator get as much cooling as possible so just like before running our heaven test until it back until it's completely uh saturated and i bet you will actually see a couple of boost bins it might even stay around that 1980 mark and not drop down to the 1950s so let's see all right so our previous test had hit like 47 48 i think it actually hit 49 by the end of it um we're capping out at 42 and then it drops back down to 41 sometimes even 40. and that's just because these are the same settings same high rpm or max rpm and i don't even know if i mentioned in the previous take i did go into the bios and set these fans to 100 because the downside of having an aio hooked up to your gpu that does not listen to the gpu and when it needs it to speed up is the fact that if it's listening to the cpu because it's plugged into the motherboard it's just going to chill at a low rpm if your cpu is not hot while your gpu needs it to ramp up to make the most effective the radiator as you can see right here seven to eight c difference by just putting higher rpm better uh static pressure fans on there i want to see 2200 on this card that's what i want to see there it is 2205 still running that's actually pretty oh okay do we pass 13 000 yes maybe please okay so we're seem to be like hard limited right around that number that 12 900 something so the reason why we're not seeing a huge score increase is although we've got the temperatures improved uh we're still dealing with some of those power limits that's just as good as it can do i guess which is not bad that's higher than the air cooled card obviously it's just whether or not this particular model is going to suffer from the fact that it has no active cooling at all for any of the pcb items and the vrms and the power delivery which is very important when you're pushing overclocks and such you can see that there is performance to be gained with aios hooked up to graphics cards um nzxc even made that bracket i don't know if they exist for 30 series yet but you could take an nzxt aio and adapt it to your graphics card and even have a fan that would mount to it because like i said you need to active cool that stuff um can get you a significant improvement in terms of clock speed and performance and many of your games and stuff if temperatures are the reason why your card isn't boosting any farther what's got to be more or less dependent on you is whether or not the additional cost is worth it more often than not aio graphics cards are going to be a hundred plus us dollars more on average because of the fact that they're paying for that aio if they got 240s you can take what it's going to cost for a cpu cooled aio or an aio cooled cpu cooler which is you know usually 240s and take that price and know it's going to be that much plus a few more percent points just because of the fact that it's a water cooled graphics card so what do you guys think comment down below if you think water cooled graphics cards with aios are worth it full cover water blocks inside of custom water loops that's a completely different discussion there's a huge diminishing returns to a open loop versus an aio that's about quality of parts that's about the passion of doing water cooling that's not even part of this discussion we are talking about aio specifically i can tell you right now the igame neptune this particular gpu has definitely been hitting 2200 or just below it on doing nothing but adding an aio to this shows that we've clearly reached an era of architecture where 2000 seemed like something we would not be able to hit just a few years ago without exotic cooling now we're at 2200 on water basic aio so sound off in the comments below what you guys think what is your go-to cooler type and why thanks for watching guys and as always we will see you in the next one oh and speaking of gpus and stuff don't forget we are giving one away so learn about it right here hey you before you click off this video you may or may not be aware i'm actually doing a worldwide graphics card giveaway where one winner will get to choose either a 6800 xt merc 319 card from xfx or a 2080 ti msi gamingx trio from team nvidia so if you're sitting there right now going i didn't know about this how do i enter follow the description down below you guys will find a link to the giveaway video that will give you all the details don't wait because it really sucks to find out about these after they're over this graphics card

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 898,522

Keywords: amd, best gpu 2020, amd vs nvidia, 6800 vs 3070, 6800xt vs 3080, 6900xt vs 3090, rdna1, rdna2, rdna, amd rdna, amd releases new gpus, 6800xt unboxing, 30 series gpu, nvidia rtx, rtx 3070, rtx 3080, rtx 3090, is the 3080 worth it, is the 3090 worth it, is the 3070 worth it, should I buy a 3070, should i buy a 3080, should I buy a 3090, is nvidia worth it, how much is 3080, how much is 3090, how much does a 3080 cost, best video card 2020, best video card 2021, bottlenecking

Id: Gv9Z6F1rk68

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021