Titan X ACX 2.0 Edition - Swapping out the leaf blower

[TheCaptain53]

So a little while ago I bought a Gigabyte GTX Titan X. A lot of you will probably say, "lul y u buy dum titan x wen 980 twhy is cheaper and same"

And to you, my well versed friend, I will reply with, "That is because I bought it for £400, approximately half its retail price." Absolutely pristine, by the way.

At any rate, after purchasing the card, my immediate thoughts turned to, 'how the hell am I gonna cool this sucker?'

 

A lot of people's opinions are that blower style coolers are pants. Whilst they certainly aren't as good as open air designs with multiple fans, they're really not bad and I definitely won't be passing up a graphics card in the future with a blower style cooler (not that I'll be buying a new one any time soon).

I had always planned to swap out the cooler on the Titan X, so after asking a few people about their experience with installing the cooler, temps etc, I decided to go ahead and buy the cooler, and do a 'first impressions' as such for my 1,000th post!

For £50, the EVGA ACX 2.0 cooler isn't too bad and it looks pretty slick. I'm loving the backplate! Definitely something I will be installing on future cards. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/evga-acx-20plus-cooler-for-geforce-gtx-titan-x-graphics-cards

 

I will add photos of the installation a little later as I'm having some trouble with my internet. The photos need to be compressed as they are too large. So let's crack on with the performance.

I thought I would use Unigine Valley as a benchmark. It's pretty demanding and got my Titan X. With the reference cooler, these are the results I was getting:

• Valley score: 3512
• 29C idle
• 82C load
• 43% fan speed
• 1139MHz core clock
• 3506MHz memory clock

Not bad, reference cooler did a good job. No thermal throttling to a massive extent, wasn't hugely noisy, can't complain. After installing the new cooler (possibly one of the most tense things I've ever done, performing surgery on an £800 graphics card), I thought I would do the same benchmark with the default fan profile:

• Valley score: 3705
• 24C idle
• 71C load
• 29% fan speed
• 1164MHz core clock
• 3506MHz memory clock

Temps have dropped quite a lot, and the score isn't too bad either considering the card is not overclocked. I thought I would try setting the fan speed to 43% (same as the reference cooler under load) and see how it performs then:

• Valley score: 3698
• 61C load
• 1164MHz core clock
• 3506MHz memory clock

Those temps! My PC did sound like it was going to take off, but those temps are awesome, haven't seen load temps like that since I had my GTX 960. 

 

So, final thoughts. It was an interesting evening to say the least, I thought I might have to go back to my 970 in tears after breaking my fucking Titan. However, the installation process wasn't overly painful. The only part that I got annoyed with was removing the fan and LED plugs, they were in there tight.

Should you get one? I certainly wouldn't rush out to buy one if you're not overclocking. But if you have £50 in your back pocket and you want to splash, hey, why not? I now have the flexibility to push my card without worrying about temps, at least not until I decide to build a custom loop.

Hope you guys enjoyed reading.

 

As a side note, I tried using a custom fan profile whereby the fans don't spin at idle, but the fan profile set in MSI Afterburner doesn't seem to be doing anything. The card still runs at 22% fan speed at idle. Anybody got an idea?