I recently reviewed the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founder’s Edition, which I dubbed “The Beast” because it was by far the fastest GPU I had ever tested, destroying every benchmark that stood in its path and demonstrating a shockingly smooth gaming experience at 4K resolution. At that time it was known that once the Founder's Edition was launched, Nvidia's partners would begin to deliver their take on the GPU with extreme cooling and aggressive overclocking, and I waited with bated breath for those to arrive.
The first of them, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX is here (See it on Amazon), and yes, this bad boy’s performance is everything I expected, and the version I tested isn’t even the fastest 1080 Ti card EVGA offers, as there's a FTW3 model that sits slightly above it in the EVGA product stack, and one below it too dubbed the Black Edition. That makes the $750 SC2 with iCX model EVGA's midrange offering, and it costs $50 more than the Founder's Edition, so let's see if it's worth it.
Design and Features
The biggest difference between EVGA’s SC2 card and the Founder's Edition (FE) is the cooling apparatus and the resulting clock speeds. First off, the SC2 has what EVGA calls iCX technology, which is the result of the company fixing an issue it had on its previous generation of cards. The TLDR version of this situation is EVGA's previous GPUs had inadequate cooling on its VRM modules, and that lead the company to come up with iCX, which is an array of temperature sensors all over the card instead of just the usual single temperature sensor. EVGA’s iCX has 10 sensors total to monitor the GPU, the back of the GPU, the power controllers, and the memory modules.
All that data is used to control the speed of the two fans (one for GPU and one for memory modules and power) separately, and you can see more temperatures in its PrecisionX software too. Combine that with a more efficient VRM heatpipe design and this card is one cool cat. Even after overclocking I never saw temps above 72C, whereas the Founder's Edition regularly ran at 84C.The big difference between the Founder's Edition's "blower style" cooler and the SC2's dual fans is the FE card exhausts the heat outside of your chassis whereas the SC2 card circulates it inside the chassis.
The card's audacious cooling allows it to run at higher clock speeds than the Founder's Edition, generally speaking. The GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX is tuned for a 1,556MHz base clock, compared to the Founder's Edition 1480MHz, and the SC2 has a 1,670MHz boost clock, compared to 1,582MHz. This boost clock is impressive enough, but keep in mind that before I even overclocked the GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX I saw it hit 1,920 MHz under heavy benchmarking load, so as always the specs of these cards are somewhat irrelevant once Nvidia's GPU Boost 3.0 gets to work.
The EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX hardware itself is solidly constructed. Nvidia removed the DVI-D port on the Founder's Edition in order to make room for additional cooling, but EVGA added it back since it's cooling was sufficient as-is. The card also sports a nifty illuminated logo that offers RGB lighting with the traditional options for having it be static, breathing, etc. There are also blue LEDs in the fans but they are hard to see unless you look underneath the card.
Pouncing on Benchmarks
I tested the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX on IGN’s shiny new test system equipped with an Intel 4.2GHz Core i7-7700K, 8GB RAM, a 500GB Intel SSD and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard running Windows 10 Home.
Benchmarks were run at 1920x1080, 2560x1440, and 3840x2160 (4K) resolutions in full-screen mode and always set to maximum or ultra quality. In all benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX outperformed the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition roughly by five percent. More importantly, games looked amazing. Rise of the Tomb Raider, a gorgeous game to begin with, was absolutely stellar with its graphics settings maxed out. Shadow of Mordor at 4K set on Ultra was almost mesmerizing.
Speaking of mesmerizing, I could sit and watch the Heaven benchmark at 4K all day. The scene where the camera angle swings down over the dragon in the courtyard showed off the texturing and lighting capabilities of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX, with the light glistening off the dragon’s veiny wings looked stunning. Also, as I mentioned above, though the GTX 1080 Ti SC2 was only about five percent faster than the Founder's Edition, it achieved this feat while running noticeably cooler, with the delta averaging roughly 12C under load. If you're the type of gamer that gets nervous seeing your precious parts running over 80C, the SC2 will help keep your mind at ease a bit.
Overclocking
I used EVGA’s Precision XOC utility to overclock the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX. I held the power limit at 100 percent and kept the temperature target at 84 degrees C, not that it matters because the card never approached that temperature. Then I edged the GPU clock speed up in 25 MHz increments to +100 MHz to 2025MHz. I increased the memory clock speed in 100 MHz increments to get to +300 MHz or 5805 MHz. Fans, set to auto, barely sped up, and GPU temps stayed between 58 and 72 during testing. This is a very slight improvement over what I was able to do with the Founder's Edition card, but it's basically a tie as that card got up to 1987MHz.
In my experience most of these high-end GeForce cards can get quite close or even slightly over 2GHz, so there's not too many surprises here. One thing that is cool, pun intended, is you can see temps for power and memory in PrecisionXOC as opposed to just GPU temp, thanks to the iCX sensors.
Purchasing Guide
The EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX has an MSRP of $749.99, and since it was just released that's price window it sells for on Amazon and other retailers:
• See the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX on Amazon
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The Verdict
Overall the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX outperformed the GTX 1080 Ti Founder's Edition at every opportunity and did so while running about 12C cooler too, which is quite a feat. I saw a performance delta of about 5 percent faster before overclocking, and with overclocking I was able to squeeze out a bit more. Either way, I was more than impressed by the ability of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX to handle any 4K benchmark with all the graphics options set as high as they can go at more than 60 FPS (except for Heaven which was a mere 56 FPS).
This is the first EVGA card I’ve tested with iCX cooling and the benefits are clear. Even under the most demanding workload the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX was a cool cat. This is remarkable given the two slot design as other manufacturers have gone up to 2.5 or even three slot width to handle this powerful GPU’s heat. Moreover, the dual fans remained quiet as they efficiently cooled the card throughout testing.
Cool, quiet, flexibly tweakable, and (relatively) modest in stature are all great things when it comes to a graphics card. Combine those with excellent performance and you’ve got a winner with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX. There are more reviews like this to come, but for now the EVGA SC2 is easily one of the best GPUs I've ever tested.