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EKWB and Bykski Water Blocks tested on Asus GTX 1080 Ti Strix

VSG

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Today, we take a look at two different watercooling solutions for the non-reference ASUS GTX 1080 Ti Strix from EKWB and Bykski. Both offer a full-cover water block with design twists of their own, and both are put through the full course of testing, including coolant flow restriction as well as GPU core and VRM thermal testing.

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Wish we saw a comparison in overclocking potential, the gtx1080 Ti was not limited in that respect by Nvidia right?
 

VSG

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Wish we saw a comparison in overclocking potential, the gtx1080 Ti was not limited in that respect by Nvidia right?

Same as the rest of the Pascal microarchitecture GPUs in that GPU Boost 3.0 will get you a high core frequency out of the box and then throttle down with temps to equilibrium. This begins around 45 celcius or so, and thus watercooling will aid here.
 
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Great review! so when in comes down to it your paying additional $200 (with back plate) for $750+ card for an OC not to throttle down. Strix already has amazing heatsink.
 

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Great review! so when in comes down to it your paying additional $200 (with back plate) for $750+ card for an OC not to throttle down. Strix already has amazing heatsink.

The original goal was to compare this to the ASUS Poseidon cooler, but that did not work out as planned owing to lack of stock. In the end, this is more of a direct comparison between two companies that have been taking up market share like crazy in different regions of the world, with the latter beginning as a pretender and now expanding to the west.
 
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I actually use Barrow block on my 1080Ti FE no complaints so far... but I've shunt modded my card a bit(~ +50W) to run without power throttling on 2100Mhz always if needed, doing so actually justifies going full water. At stock decent air coolers are enough as the card is locked pretty much down.
 
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