Hardware stub

Inno3D Puts Arctic AIO on GPU, Calls it iChiLL BLACK GTX 1080

Posted on September 9, 2016

Taking a break from innovating tediously typed names for graphics cards, Inno3D claims it has now improved GPU AIO cooling with its new “iChiLL BLACK” GTX 1080. For future reference, we'll revert capitalization to something that makes more sense and is less susceptible to triggering sticky keys.

The iChill unit runs a CLC mounted atop the silicon, as one would expect from any AIO-cooled card (review of Hybrid vs. Sea Hawk here), and uses an aluminum baseplate with heatspreaders for the VRM and VRAM cooling. Heat conducted through the baseplate is dissipated with an 80mm blower fan, similar to the Sea Hawk, though Inno3D markets that their fan is capable of spinning down to 0RPM under low load. As far as we can tell, Inno3D does not deploy a copper VRAM cooling plate like EVGA does with its Hybrid, and instead takes a more traditional route of using thermal pads to communicate heat to the baseplate. The plate is cooled entirely independently from the GPU, and vice versa.

Inno3D purchases its supply of liquid coolers from Arctic Cooling, who buy their supply from Asetek. The fan and shroud are both Arctic units, with the CLC an Asetek 120mm CLC. The entire cooling unit largely resembles what could be purchased standalone from Arctic Cooling and applied to most boards, though Inno3D does add a more intelligent fan controller and LEDs that change based upon load. A glance at the marketing images indicates that this is likely a reference PCB.

We might look at this one, though it is a bit less interesting in its engineering properties than the EVGA Hybrid and Gigabyte AIO cards. We are looking at one of the Gigabyte units this week.

More here: http://www.inno3d.com/news_detail.php?refid=358

- Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.