EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 iCX FTW2 Review: Everything Detected, More Than Just A Cooler

Name: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 iCX FTW2
Brand: EVGA

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, February 10, 2017, 12:10 PM EDT

Overclocking, Power Consumption, Noise, and Temps

We also spent a little time overclocking the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW2 with iCX, to see what kind of additional performance it had left under its hood.

To overclock the card, we used EVGA's own XOC utility. To achieve the results below, we cranked up the power target to 120% and kicked up the temperature target to 91 degrees. Then we bumped up the GPU and memory clocks until the test system was no longer stable. We did not tweak fan speeds or voltages. Our goal was to find the maximum GPU clock for the card, without excessive tweaking, to give you all a realistic target and to see what temperatures looks like using the default profile. Of course, tweaking voltages and fan speeds would change the results (and potentially create more noise), but since there are so many potential variables, we kept things simple and straightforward.

The fruits of our labor are detailed in the image above. This is data captured from EVGA's utility which shows the max temperatures, GPU frequencies, and much more, after a number of of benchmark runs with actual games. As you can see, the card's GPU peaked at an impressive 2.1GHz and despite setting such a high temp target, the GPU temperature never exceeded a balmy 76ºC.

While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some moderate performance improvements in the games / settings we tested. Because the card is already factory overclocked, the additional bumps in performance aren't huge, but versus a stock GTX 1080, the increases are in the 9 - 11% range.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

power

Despite its higher clocks, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTX2 with iCX technology uses roughly the same power as a Founder's Edition.

In terms of its noise output, all of these cards are very quiet as well. When idling, due to the fact that their fans either don't spin at all, or spin slowly, there is virtually no noise produced by these cards. Under load, once temperatures have increased, their fans do spin up, but all of the cards remained what we would consider "quiet." We should note, however, that much of the additional noise under load in this graph can be attributed to our test system's power supply and CPU cooler. All of these graphics cards are relatively quiet under load, especially if you test inside a chassis like we do.