The new Nvidia cards are finally here and they’ve launched with great success; the cards are performing well at a competitive price range and this is very good news for Nvidia. Obviously, not all of the new cards hitting the market are created equally and early suggestions are saying the new EVGA GTX 970 ACX cooler isn’t being used to its full potential.
The images of the new card and its cooler suggest that they’ve used the cooler from a bigger card to save on manufacturing costs; the problem here being that one of the three heat-pipes barely makes any contact with the GPU. Rival cards are out pacing the EVGA card in the cooling department and it’s likely that the card could be performing better in benchmarks if the cooler was used to its full potential.
As you can see in the picture below the chip is barely touching the first heat pipe, although it may not be touching at all as most of the thermal paste on the pipe looks like excess from around the edge of the chip. The 2nd (middle) heat pipe is fine and so is the 3rd on the right; but you can clearly see that the chip is overhanging the heat-pipes by several millimetres on the right. It definitely appears that the chip and the pipes are poorly aligned.
Could EVGA recall the cooler? Or perhaps they’ll be releasing an updated model in the near future? We’ll have to wait and see.
EVGA have yet to comment on this matter, but we’ll update you if we find out more.
UPDATE: EVGA have responded as seen here.
Thank you Reddit for providing us with this information.
Images courtesy of Reddit.
if you look at the paste that is over spill there is no contact on the 3rd heat pipe
What about the 980s from EVGA, any issues with those?
Do companies just not think? It’s human nature to be curious and there is even a market for custom coolers, how did they expect this cut-corner job to not be found out.
I think they did, it’s just that most people don’t really care and would buy since it’s EVGA.
Bad business practice indeed.
dude the tiny pipe is for the memory or power, the 2 fat pipe are for the core this is intended and fine, this article is bullshit
No you are wrong. the small was never for power or memory. This is the same heatsink used in the previous generation of ACX. If you actually look closer, you see part of the die is touching the outside plate. That should be like that. What is the point of the smaller heatpipe when it is not touching anything.
You post is bullshit, when you do not know how these work.
but at least its touching 2 fat pipe instead of one fat and one thin heatpipe so it could be worse…
It is goog that those two heat-pipe’s are very fat 🙂
Is it just me or does it look like the skinny pipe doesn’t do anything? The two large pipes come to a point at the end and are sealed. The smaller pipe looks cut off at the end and doesn’t look sealed.
Not only EVGA variant has terrible design but also that praised ACX cooler is as loud as a reference card. And the temperatures are terrible too. EVGA really fked up this time.
If it runs okay on two pipes, then the third pipe doesn’t really matter. If they had a load of these things with 3 pipes just sitting around, and using them was cheaper than building a new one with two pipes, then I can understand their decision. Ask yourself – if they took out the third pipe, would it run any cooler?
Of course, if it runs hot and actually NEEDS that third pipe, that’s a different matter.
Quality http://i.imgur.com/IRzqxZo.jpg
vs
EVGArbage
http://cdn.eteknix.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/O63MVHx-e1411375506488.jpg
EVGA is a disappointment, they used to be on top of the world with motherboards and video cards…how the mighty have fallen.
Well hold on a sec – is this the ACX 1.0 or 2.0? Possibly a result of using old parts (1.0) on the new cards
Actually as much money as copper costs if this heat pipe was not needed it would not be there. Don’t let your loyalty to a company blind you to its shortcomings and mistakes. It is up to EVGA’s customer base to hold them accountable and to a higher standard. That is what keeps companies producing top quality products.
This was done intentionally, according to EVGA. Check the thread here >>> http://forums.evga.com/evga-acx-cooler-defect-eteknixcom-thinks-so-m2220546.aspx
The third unused pipe has a metal divider which is connected and part of the whole heat transfer block, so I’m sure there’s some heat mitigation there but not what you would get with direct transfer. Being the Maxwell 970 runs so cool anyway I can’t see it being much.of a issue. That being said, I hate the acx and all these coolers that use hot case air to cool the gpu and then dump it right back in the case again. Really stupid designs!! If I owned one of these I’d probably show you guys a easy way tp mod it and fix it, but I’ll never buy something like that. 😉
Anybody do stress testing on one of these cards to see if it heats up significantly more than the reference or other boards?