Questions about EVGA gpu's

[biggles]

1. ACX vs ICX. Some articles said ICX was more effective at cooling, while others said they were the same. Any personal experience with the 2 cooling methods? Which would you buy if price was the same?
2. Some ACX cooled cards have had problems, and EVGA gave away thermal pads or something else to fix. Is it wise to avoid used ACX cards? In other words, no way to tell if an ebay seller applied any fixes. This would be for a 10 series card.
3. Conventional wisdom used to be to not pay extra for overclocked cards. My understanding is that EVGA has stock clocked, superclocked, and FTW with increased out of the box clock speeds for each of the 3 categories. Is it still the best value to get the stock clocked gpu and manually overclock them? I am assuming the result would be close to the more expensive cards, subject to luck of the draw ("the silicon lottery").

 

[Armenius]

1. The biggest difference between ACX 3.0 and iCX is the latter has a lot more temperature sensors. The fans are also asynchronous on the iCX, controlled by the temperature of the components they're supposed to cool. The fans on the ACX are synchronous and solely controlled by the GPU temperature reported.
2. ACX 2.0 and older did not come with thermal pads for the power phases, it's true. My only experience with the ACX cooler is the standalone addon for the Maxwell Titan X, and that one came with thermal pads for the power phases. ACX 3.0 should have come with the extra thermal pads already. You can tell if it is 3.0 by looking at the EVGA model number. I don't remember what they are off the top of my head. If you want to be sure, you can always ask the seller for photos to be sure, and you can look up the model number on EVGA's website.
3. FTW cards come with a custom BIOS that alters the Boost tables including the voltage step up and base clock speeds. SC cards are just overclocked out of the box, as far as I'm aware. EVGA guarantees that FTW and SC cards will run at their advertised speeds out of the box. I don't know if they do any binning of the chips, though their internal testing to guarantee clock speeds would suggest that they do, at least within a certain range. They offer specific binning with the K|NGP|N cards, but that is a waste of money as all Pascal cards have the same clock speed ceilings due to the architecture.

 

[_l_]

EVGA has a warranty second to none. As long as you don't modify your card and screw it up they will replace it. You can pull off the cooler and water cool it and no problem with the warranty. You can call EVGA tech support 24/7 and they usually answer within a few minutes max. No other company comes close. Many buy other brands to save a few $$$ but it's not worth it if your card dies and it's not EVGA ... you've been warned