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  • Chaitanya - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Another reason for Evga to hike prices of their already overpriced crap.
  • Murloc - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    you can buy the basic version.

    At least you're sure to get quality, reputation is worth $$$ to companies for a reason.
  • willis936 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    You mean the basic version that has the thermal pads added the VRMs that increase the GPU temperature? My load temp increased a solid 10 degrees after I swapped out. When their cooler actually is working it's apparent that it's worst in show. Fix it but not without bumping the prices first!
  • justtryingtohelp - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Hey willis936,
    If your GPU temps went up 10 degrees after the swap, I highly recommend that you repaste the GPU. The change in temperature that you describe could only be related to a direct-die heat sink issue. Be sure to not wiggle the heat sink too much when putting it back on, you're liable to remove some of the paste inadvertently.
  • willis936 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Yep. Did that. Twice. With differing amounts of NH-T1. The temps were so high I just did the advanced RMA. Same story with a card fresh out of the retail packaging.
  • Hxx - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    who says anything about quality with EVGA. Ive owned 2 cards from them with problems. One with a defective display port and the other overheating, both were RMAd for replacements. There is no more "quality" at EVGA as it is with the others.
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    When I bought my GTX 970, the EVGA ACX 2.0 Superclocked was the lowest priced variant on the market. I didn't choose it because it was EVGA or because of the branding, I went ahead with the purchase because I saw the larger factory overclock and dual fan HSF as value added features over other GTX 970s at the same pricepoint at the time.

    Every company's offerings wax and wane in price depending on current pricing details. And sometimes, like in my case, the more expensive variants of the card may go down in price to match lower tier offerings of the same GPU.
  • Samus - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link

    I don't see how this will actually result in a quieter cooler. If you have two fans and spin one slower, the sound density is still the same as if they were spinning at the same speed. Sound pressure is linear, anything quieter is outweighed by the louder sound-producing device.
  • r3loaded - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    Do the VRMs still explode?
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    VRMs probably will be fine if you don't push the card out of Nvidia's factory clockspeed specifications or, if you're really concerned, a nice healthy underclock would take some pressure off them and give you a cooler running card overall. The 1080 is pretty fast so there's no reason to run it as high as even factory clocks.
  • 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.

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