Water Meets Boat MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X Graphics Card Finishing Up

2016 launched the all-in-one water-cooled graphics card MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X, and the U.S. commercial corsair CORSAIR cooperation to create through the all-in-one water-cooled direct-pressure core, there is a good cooling effect to help the core of the GTX 1080 graphics card heat dissipation, but it is more or less the same appearance with beggar's edition model, let people feel a little bit of no heart, and this time, I purchased a to This time, I purchased one to further complete the list of graphics cards in my collection by organizing and unboxing it.

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X Graphics CardSpecifications:

Display Core: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
PCI Express: 3.0 x16
CUDA: 2560
GPU Clock: 1847 MHz / 1708 MHz (OC Mode)
Memory Specification: 8GB GDDR5X
Memory Clock: 10108 MHz (OC Mode)
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Dimensions: 270 x 111 x 40 mm
Occupied Slot: 2 Slot
Power supply interface: 1x PCIe 8-Pin
Recommended Power Wattage: 500W
DirectX: 12
OpenGL: 4.5
Display output: 1x HDMI 2.0b, 3x DisplayPort 1.4, DL-DVI-D
Multi-screen output limit: 4
SLI graphics card cascading: 2-way SLI HB

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X Graphics Card Unveiled by Water Dragon Ancestor

This time around, the first water-cooled graphics card has been added to the collection's harem, and since the last MSI GeForce GTX 970 GAMING 4G Golden EditionAfter that, I focused my next acquisition goal on all-in-one water-cooled graphics cards. After looking at MSI's all-in-one water-cooled graphics card series SEA HAWK, there are NVIDIA 980/1080/2080/3080 chipsets, etc., but on the whole, only the 1080 is able to meet the pass mark of my preference in terms of appearance, and the rest of the chipsets are either too sporty or too ugly. ....

This time I spent about 3750 on a single card MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X. The price is honestly a bit expensive, the author personally expects the price to be around 2700~3200, but the price is very hard to reconcile with a little bit of a pity, but it doesn't matter, at least the overall condition of the card is still okay (collectors just have to pay a little bit of collector's tax)! But it doesn't matter, at least the overall condition of the card is still good (collectors just need to pay a little more collection tax...).

The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X is dated 2016/08 and is eight years old in a nutshell. It uses NVIDIA Pascal architecture GP140-400-A1 cores with 2,560 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR5X graphics memory, and the maximum frequency of the graphics cores can be pushed up to 1,847 MHz. The maximum frequency of the graphics cores can be pushed up to 1847MHz.

The overall appearance of the card is exactly the same as the MSI GTX 1080 AERO 8G except for the water cooling fins and tubes, the same turbo fans and casing style, except for the addition of CORSAIR and all-in-one water cooling, there is no difference at all, look at the current RTX™ 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G at least there is some improvement in adjusting the appearance of the design vocabulary.

∆ MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X All-in-One Liquid-Cooled Graphics Card.

∆'s SEA HAWK collection with US-based pirate ship CORSAIR was later transformed into a collaboration with Asetek.

The dimensions of the ∆ graphics card are 270 x 111 x 40 mm, and the design is identical to that of the AERO series.

 

A metal-reinforced backplate increases the strength of the PCB, but the cooling module is not as heavy as an air-cooled module, so it's more of a decorative feature and prevents dust from coming into direct contact with the card.

∆ Dragon Soul Reinforced Backplate.

∆ The previous user felt that something dripped into it, it was sticky and couldn't be removed, the screws were rusty and oxidized but not the rest of the unit, the overall condition of the card was passable.

∆ Obsolete SLI interface.

 

The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X is only 40 mm thick because there are no heatpipes or large cooling fins to take up the thickness of the card, which means that it will only be used in the 2-Slot PCIE mounting location.

Powered by a PCIe 8-Pin slot, the official website specifies a power consumption of 180W and suggests using it with a 500W power supply, but during the stress test the actual power consumption was around 200W.

∆PCIE 8-Pin power supply, Corsair logo on the test edge but no RGB lighting effect.

∆ Water-cooled pipe outlet.

There are cooling fin vents at the end of the ∆ graphics card, but there wasn't a lot of heat coming out of these during the test.

The ∆ long side is sealed on both sides, so the turbine fan airflow will come out of the front and rear ends.

 

The card has five video output ports: 1x HDMI 2.0b, 3x DisplayPort 1.4, DL-DVI-D, leaving a large hole for airflow, but again, not much heat came out of this area during the test.

∆ 1x HDMI 2.0b, 3x DisplayPort 1.4, DL-DVI-D.

 

As an all-in-one water-cooled graphics card, MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X features a 120 mm all-in-one water cooling module in collaboration with Corsair, which directly presses the GP140-400-A1 core through the 120 mm fan and water cooler combination to keep the graphics card temperature lower.

The overall dimensions of the water-cooled exhaust and fan are 151 x 120 x 52 mm, which is a common combination of 27 mm water-cooled exhaust and 25 mm fan, while the water-cooled tubes are 378 x 10.6 mm with Ø 10.6 mm tubes connecting the exhaust to the water-cooling head.

The CORSAIR fan is a DC 3-Pin white light fan, which may seem relatively sunny now, but it's a reasonable combination in 2016, and I'm sure I'll be replacing it with my favorite fan in the future.

The overall dimensions of the ∆ All-in-One Liquid-Cooling Package are 151 x 120 x 52 mm, with the fan and cooling platen being of regular thickness.

The ∆ fan is illuminated by white LED light bulbs in the four corners, giving it a somewhat sunny feel.

∆ DC 3-Pin power supply.

∆ 120 mm water-cooled row.

 

Graphics card disassembly and cleaning

After testing the original condition, let's take the card apart and clean it! It's not too difficult to disassemble the whole card and replace the thermal paste, basically just remove all the screws on the back panel and remove the two larger Phillips screws on the monitor output connector, and then you can separate the reinforced back panel, water cooling module, and graphics card PCB.

∆ The display card screws are removed.

The ∆ backplane does not have any thermal pads, so it does not have any heat dissipation purpose, but can only be used to enhance the PCB strength and look good.

 

As I mentioned earlier, the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X is actually a pirate water cooler that is used to compress the core of the card, but instead of relying on the water cooling, the VRAM and power supply ICs of the card's memory are cooled by the airflow of the turbofan.

The heat pads on the left side of the ∆ are for power IC cooling, and on the right side is the all-in-one water cooling head for the graphics card core.

∆ The graphics card has two cables to be connected.

The ∆turbine fan will be half exposed to allow some airflow onto the PCB.

∆The dry thermal paste next to the 8 GB GDDR5X graphics card memory has a cooling plan, but it is cooled by turbo fans rather than integrated water cooling.

∆ There is a little bit of height left for wind flow to pass through the PCB, but the height is not meant to be very high.

∆ The body of the water-cooled head, with dust on the side, shows that the airflow does pass through here.

 

Next, let's take a look at the situation near the PCB core, what surprises me is that there is no oil spillage from the 256-bit 8GB GDDR5X VRAM thermal pads, of course, I know that it is normal for the thermal pads to overflow silicone oil with prolonged use, but it seems that this is the advantage of the all-in-one water-cooled graphics card cooling, isn't it?GDDR5X Graphics Memory The heat generated by the particles themselves may be suppressed by the turbo fans alone, while the common air-cooled cooling module cools the core, power supply ICs, and VRAM together, so the temperature of the core chip will be affected, making the cooling effect less effective than that of individual cooling.

∆ PCB View.

∆ The thermal pads on the graphics card memory are in good condition and remain sticky, so they are not replaced, with a thickness of about 1 mm.

 

The card is in surprisingly good condition, just blow out some dust and reapply the thermal paste, this time updating the core thermal paste to Cooler Master MASTERGEL MAKER 40g for use (thermal conductivity 11W/mK).

∆ Remove the old antipyretic cream.

∆ Reapply the heat dissipating cream.

∆ The water cooler head is slightly cleaned.

∆ Blow off the dust.

 

Comparison of cooling performance and scores before and after cleaning

I ran some tests on a modern PC platform before removing the card for reference, but I don't think anyone is going to buy a 1080 anymore, so just take a look.

Testing Platform
Processor: Intel Core i9 13900K (MSI Game Boots_on)
Cooler: Valkyrie E360 (full speed)
Water-cooled fan: LIAN LI UNI FAN P28 (full speed)
Motherboard: MSI MEG Z690I UNIFY ( BIOS version: 7D29v1G )
Memory:Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 RGB 7200 MT/s 16GBx2 White
Graphics: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X
Operating System: Windows 11 Professional 22H2
System Drive: Plextor PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 2280 SSD 512GB
Gaming Disk: Intel 670P 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe SSD (Solidigm)
Power supply:FSP Hydro PTM PRO ATX3.0 (PCIe5.0) 1200W
Graphics Card Driver: GeForce Game Ready 555.99
Case: STREACOM BC1 Benchtable V2

 

Furmark 2 Geeks3D is a GPU stress testing software for Windows and Linux platforms. It also supports OpenGL and Vulkan GPU API graphical benchmarking, allowing gamers to perform free Benchmark benchmarking.

The GPU temperature peaked at 61.9 °C before changing the thermal paste; the GPU hotspot temperature peaked at 72.9 °C and scored 6045 points in the score.

∆ Maximum temperature of 72.9 °C before thermal paste replacement.

The ∆ run score is 6045.

 

After replacing the thermal paste, the GPU temperature peaked at 55.7°C; the GPU hotspot temperature peaked at 66.7°C, which resulted in a score of 6055 points, and the maximum temperature was lowered by about 6°C. The score was a small improvement.

∆ Pressure test condition after thermal paste replacement.

∆ Running scores are somewhat improved.

 

Steel Nomad The tests will be conducted at 3840 x 2160, or 4K, and are for the DirectX 12 benchmark running Windows 10 and 11. The program supports Multi sub-pass rendering, which allows you to set which API you want to use when using GPU APIs such as Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12 on your graphics card. The Nomad can be configured to test with any of these APIs when the graphics card is using GPU APIs such as Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12. It also supports Geometry Rendering, Surface Illumination, Particles, Asynchronous compute, Volumetric clouds, Screen clouds, Screen-space shadows, Screen-space reflections, Volume illumination and more.

Since Steel Nomad does not have a CPU test, the CPU's main role in the test is to write a list of instructions for the GPU to execute. A large number of tasks are allowed to be performed throughout the course of the test project. For example, rendering is done through multiple CPU threads, one for each available CPU core. This will shorten the CPU rendering time and reduce the chance of the CPU becoming bottlenecked.

而 Steel Nomad Light With a lower load pressure and tested at 2560 x 1440, or 2K resolution, the Steel Nomad, by the way, is roughly seven times the load of Fire Strike; roughly three times that of Time Spy.

∆ 3840 x 2160_4K resolution Steel Nomad DirectX12 tested.

∆ 2560 x 1440_2K resolution Steel Nomad Light DirectX12 tested.

 

Conclusion

It is not necessary or desirable to spend around 3750 dollars to buy MSI GeForce GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X all-in-one water cooled graphics card, I just want to study the structure of the all-in-one water cooled graphics card to see how it works, and it is not good to store it without a box, so I will probably use it as a test platform.

I basically have all the graphics cards I want to collect, and then all I need is the RTX 2080 Ti LIGHTNING Z and I'm done.