A Closer Look

EVGA is using a cooler with five heatpipes. The bottom of the thermal assembly also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate consists of two pieces, just like on the NVIDIA reference design. EVGA's idea here is to keep heat from the VRM and GPU circuitries separated. Note the thermal pads here which provide a little bit of extra cooling for either circuitry.


A BIOS switch that lets you toggle to a second BIOS with a slightly higher power-adjustment maximum has also been added (the default power limit is 180 W for either BIOS). Both BIOSes are identical otherwise.


EVGA has upgraded the power input of their card to 2x 8-pin, which is specified for up to 375 W of power input. This seems a bit overkill given the card's power consumption tops out at 210 W at stock and the board power limit after adjustments is set to 217 W on the primary BIOS and 235 W on the secondary BIOS.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.