Thermal Performance

Testing the block for thermal performance was fairly simple, once you realize that you have to measure VRM temperatures manually. As such, I installed an Omega NTC type thermistor on VRM 1 and connected it to an external display for a VRM temperature readout. TechPowerUp GPU-Z was used to monitor GPU core temperatures. The GPU was overclocked to 2 GHz, although with how GPU Boost 3.0 works, it did vary by +/- 1 clock bin (13 MHz). Similarly, with core voltage being near impossible to set manually and fix at that point, it is best to compare the results below within the data set and not with other reviews elsewhere. For what it is worth, 1.20 V was set at Vcore using EVGA Precision-X.

Everything required was placed inside a hotbox, and the ambient temperature was set to 25 °C. Gelid GC-Extreme was used as the thermal paste of choice since not all blocks come with TIM included, and cure time was taken into consideration. Five separate mounts/runs were done for statistical accuracy and to remove the chance of any mounting-related anomalies. For each run, a 60 minute Unigine Heaven 4.0 run was done, and temperatures were monitored until a steady state was reached, after which they were recorded. A delta T of GPU core/VRM and loop temperatures was thus calculated for each run with an average delta T that was then obtained across all five runs. This way, the cooling solution is taken out of the picture.


When the difference between all the blocks is just over 3 °C in terms of GPU core cooling, you know things are hard to distinguish. The EVGA Hydro Copper GTX 1080 falls into the lower half of the table here, and a lot of this has to do with the older coolant flow model in the cold plate and the lack of cramming in a lot of microfins, and thus also microchannels, over the core. Also note that I did have the EVGA ACX backplate here, which may have helped thermal performance further as opposed to only having the block by itself, though not by much if so.

When it comes to VRM cooling, things are a lot more spread out. Here, the EVGA block does even worse unfortunately, although I will note that this is still well within what the power delivery on the reference GTX 1080 PCB needs. This will affect the scoring, however!