Liquid Cooling Our GTX 1080 Ti: Hybrid Project Pt. 1, Tear-Down

Our review of the nVidia GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition card went live earlier this morning, largely receiving praise for jaunts in performance while remaining the subject of criticism from a thermal standpoint. As we've often done, we decided to fix it. Modding the GTX 1080 Ti will bring our card up to higher native clock-rates by eliminating the thermal limitation, and can be done with the help of an EVGA Hybrid kit and a reference design. We've got both, and started the project prior to departing for PAX East this weekend.

This is part 1, the tear-down. As the content is being published, we are already on-site in Boston for the event, so part 2 will not see light until early next week. We hope to finalize our data on VRM/FET and GPU temperatures (related to clock speed) immediately following PAX East. These projects are always exciting, as they help us learn more about how a GPU behaves. We did similar projects for the RX 480 and GTX 1080 at launch last year.

Here's part 1:

The full review is here.

Host: Steve Burke
Video: Andrew Coleman