The history of ICX and the 9 sensors
Once again, a quick look back at 2017 shows us where these values come from, as very little has actually changed in EVGA’s proprietary solution. At that time I had proved that you can’t read out any temperatures except the GPU diode with the usual tools, because what was sometimes still offered as VRM or VRM2 temperature in the usual programs like GPU-Z were e.g. only return values of the PWM controllers (intrinsic temperature, aux), but unfortunately no real measured values. And the memory temperatures of the old Micron modules were not readable at that time anyway.
At the time, EVGA was the first manufacturer in the consumer sector to take an unusual approach. A total of nine thermal sensors were placed on the slightly modified circuit board at the neuralgic points where hotspots could occur. Since then, their determined values can be displayed and also logged with EVGA’s Precision software. For hardcore control freaks this is a real paradise, for most a nice technical gimmick and, if you are completely honest, probably a little too much of a good thing, because the really relevant hotspots are actually only in two or three places. But if marketing smells its chance, so be it.
But be that as it may, these values can also be used for some nice gimmicks, like the asynchronous fan control introduced by EVGA for the first time, which is based on real measured values in contrast to older solutions and also makes it possible to create two independent curves for each of the two fans via the software.
The assignment of the respective sensors to the fans was somewhat illogical at that time, because the RAM sits almost predominantly under the left fan, however the values should affect the right fan over the voltage transformer according to foil. This is also the case in practice, because the actual hotspot sat on the M7 memory module (between GPU and VRMs) even back then, and if you take off the cooling backplate, only the right fan starts spinning more, because the RAM gets hotter than the voltage converters. So you cool the MOSFETs all the way to Siberia, but you hardly get the memory any cooler.
Let us now deal with the technical realization. With 8-bit flash-type micro-controllers from Sonic, EVGA relies on MCUs to capture sensor readings in near real-time.
A total of nine small thermal sensors are placed above and below the board at the possible focal points, which are to detect the respective surface temperatures of the board. By the way, this is also one of the problems, because the values inside the neighbouring components cannot be measured in this indirect way. Which, by itself, thus already seems richly questionable. After all, the delta between the temperature in the memory and the board next to it is up to 20 degrees, but at the time it was a first step, you have to acknowledge that. Here are two of the nine sensors (memory, VRM)
All values could only be read by the proprietary EVGA software at the time, but that was to be expected. Today this looks better thanks to programs like HWInfo64. This was the technical state of the art four years ago and nothing has changed significantly in terms of the measuring points and the content of the recorded values. However, technical progress continues and I will now show you why the whole ICX story has actually become completely obsolete and only serves for advertising purposes.
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