1080 FE + aftermarket cooling

They make noise, too.

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nagi
Posts: 125
Joined: Tue Aug 31, 2010 6:48 pm
Location: Outside the box

1080 FE + aftermarket cooling

Post by nagi » Sat Jul 09, 2016 1:00 am

Hi guys!

As I usually buy my cards with the intention to mod them, I just did it with a 1080 founders edition. The card in itself is loud, but the makers of my aftermarket cooling of choice (Arctic) said their buggest one (Accelero Xtreme IV) is compatible with it. I already used the very same cooler for my R9 290X, which has 50% higher default TDP (and I always set it to +50% TDP, whereas for nvidia, +20% power limit is the max), so I did not think there would be a problem.

Aaanyway, a couple of hours, some blood sacrifice and a heart attack later (the card did not have a proper seating twice, due to an errant fan cable and a mis-aligned retention bracket.), it is finished.

What remains of the original:
Image

And the resultant monstrosity:
Image
Features:
-extends a couple inches extra, if you have a HDD rack there, remove it
-needs about 3 slots down, (+1 for airflow) 1 up instead of the 2 of the original
-40°C idle in a 28°C room at 27% fan speed. Original was ~50°C and at a higher fan%. (I'm actually still using the same fan profile in MSI Afterburner as I did with the 290X, and it works great.)
-retention bracket so it doesn't sag.... that much
-you absolutely can't see the PCie socket from either side if the motherboard is in the case, unless you use a small mirror
-whisper quiet

Note: the blue heatsinks are extra zalman sinks, they are not included in the original package for the Xtreme IV. I put them on the memory chips and some of the VRMs. Some of the latter have already popped off, as the chips don't have enough surface for the adhesive to keep the sink on.
Tips for the sinks:
1. the memory chips don't have the clearance the VRM area has
2. you want to put them on before the giant GPU cooler.
3. be extremely careful while putting on the side-screws and other stuff, you can knock these heatsinks off very easily.

Now I was a bit afraid, because some people on youtube already disassembled their FEs, and one of them managed to break a few of the tiny original backplate screws. But it turns out they probably simply had the hand dexterity of a drunken gorilla. I tensioned a couple till the crewdriver popped out of them, but did not manage to break them.

The only problems I had during disassembly are the following:
- you have to pop/slide out parts of the shroud, they are not held in place only by screws unlike my previous AMD cards
- the cable to the LED side lighting was routed badly in the factory, I could not disconenct it before further disassembly. I tried, and ended up breaking some bits off the socket.

The problems you might have during disassembly:
- screw types: tiny hex bolts hold the baseplate, and the backplate screws into these with tiny phillips screws the guy broke on youtube. You should use jewellery or electronics screwdrivers. I had a couple of the latter that were bundled with past mobile parts from eBay, while my $10-15 cheap ebay 42-part toolkit had the bolt drivers. Torx and regular sized phillips you should already have.
- a metric ton of screws. Get a magnetic plate so you don't lose any of them and you don't them mix up (then again, the aftermarket cooler comes with its own, much, much smaller set)

I also wanted to mod the original baseplate into a VRM / memory heatsink, the same way I did with the 290X, but it has so many portruding extra bits that it will be probably a couple weeks or months before I even try to cut it to size.

nagi
Posts: 125
Joined: Tue Aug 31, 2010 6:48 pm
Location: Outside the box

Re: 1080 FE + aftermarket cooling

Post by nagi » Sat Jul 09, 2016 8:30 am

Photos I took during (de)construction:
https://goo.gl/photos/YTQUFTVE7SGb4vy67
(+1 shot from my old-old CPU cooler that got demoted... and had the shadow of the fan shroud embedded into it with dust )

Abula
Posts: 3662
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:22 pm
Location: Guatemala

Re: 1080 FE + aftermarket cooling

Post by Abula » Sat Jul 09, 2016 9:02 am

Pretty nice upgrade, thanks for sharing.

Nice to see the ACELERO IV works on the GTX1080 Reference, btw have you checked that fan speeds are fully functional, i mean if it drops down and up as the temperature raises, and what are your highest temps gaming?

ggumdol
Posts: 154
Joined: Mon Aug 05, 2013 1:01 pm
Location: Scandinavia

Re: 1080 FE + aftermarket cooling

Post by ggumdol » Sat Jul 09, 2016 11:18 am

Many thanks for sharing your bloody and heart-threatening modding process. The heatsinks of Accelero Xtreme series are substantially superior to almost all heatsinks in terms of thickness/numbers of heatpipes. I sincerely wish a quick convalescence of your bleeding finger!

I also would like to see the fan speed and temperature under full load. If the GPU fan header is not compatible, you should not be concerned. You can always use SpeedFan, which is really easy to use, once you've got the drill (Set the fan to "Manual" in "Advanced" and add a fan curve in "Fan Control").

nagi wrote:Aaanyway, a couple of hours, some blood sacrifice and a heart attack later (the card did not have a proper seating twice, due to an errant fan cable and a mis-aligned retention bracket.), it is finished.

nagi
Posts: 125
Joined: Tue Aug 31, 2010 6:48 pm
Location: Outside the box

Re: 1080 FE + aftermarket cooling

Post by nagi » Sat Jul 09, 2016 5:15 pm

As the fan is plugged into the GPU itself, it should be regulated just as any other stock fan.

I use custom fan profiles, (with MSI afterburner) so it cannot be directly compared to a stock card. However, here are my findings:

At first, I forgot to reset the curve, and used the 1080 with the one I used with my 290X. This mean that the card was about 35-36°C in a 27°C room, and allowed to heat up to 75°C on stock load. This also made the card virtually silent on load, and it still delivered its performance.
I think this result was taken with this silent fan curve:
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9193761
Unfortunately I do not have this curve saved, but it was quite generous and kept my 290X at 75°C with +50% power limit and it was very quiet. My aging Mugen II rev.B CPU cooler was louder.


Then I set a new curve for OC that took into account that the card will start thermal throttling of the maximum boost clock over 60°C:
Image
And applied the following overclock in afterburner after some hours of testing:
Core voltage offset: +75
Power limit: 120%
Core clock: +210Mhz
Memory Clock: +510Mhz
Any more would cause driver crash / black texture artifacting. Maybe some more extra voltage would help with the first, but I stopped at this one (for now?).
Anyway, with this new curve, on load I was still far away from the stock cooler vacuum, but it was noticeable (in my extremely quiet room) if there wasn't any game sound going on. It also stopped at around 60-61°C.

Results:
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9226421

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