Manufacturers haven't waited to announce new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards. Nvidia announced the 1080 Ti Founders Edition on February 28. Just three days later, EVGA teased what it called the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 with iCX Technology, albeit with nothing more than a name and an image.
The 1080 Ti FTW3 iCX is the heir apparent to the all-too-similarly-named 1080 FTW2 iCX. Both use the company's (sorta) new iCX cooler technology, which features a redesigned cooler shroud and PCB with nine different temperature sensors: three for memory, five for PWM, and one for the GPU. The iCX tech was inspired by problems with the ACX 3.0 cooling used by the company's GeForce GTX 1080/1070 FTW cards; EVGA released free thermal pad kits and BIOS updates to help affected consumers address the issue. It also made iCX and, as the name implies, built it into the 1080 FTW2 iCX.
We examined the 1080 FTW2 iCX in February and concluded that EVGA's efforts were worthwhile even if the card isn't perfect:
With more sensors, the thermal pads we wanted to see added, and lots of features, EVGA is trying to get you to forget about its previous cooler. If the card also had a larger heat sink with integrated cooling for the memory and VRMs, it would be even better. It’s always good to know everything is in the green when it comes to temperatures, especially if you don’t have easy access to thermal imaging cameras and holes drilled in your backplate to verify thermal readings.
It's probably a safe bet that the 1080 Ti FTW3 iCX will be much like its older sibling. The usual suspects will be different--the 1080 Ti boasts a Pascal GP102 GPU with 3,584 Cuda cores that boost up to 1,600Mhz and 11GB of 11 Gbps GDDR5X memory, which promises to make it faster than the 1080--but the overall goal of making people forget about ACX 3.0's problems is likely the same.
EVGA didn't reveal a release date, price, or full specs for the 1080 Ti FTW3 iCX; we expect to learn more about the card soon. In the meantime, Inno3D was the first manufacturer to announce custom GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards, and it actually provided more information about the two products.
