 Those backplates that you find on some graphics cards are like a bra for your graphics card. They look sexy and alluring, making the reveal of what's underneath that much more fun and the sag prevention is a bonus. But do they help with cooling? I mean you can find people asking about this everywhere, from the Linus Tech Tips forum, to Overclock.net, to Tom's Hardware, to EVGA's own forums, Reddit, and even Super User forums. They're all asking the same question and the answer has always been nope, no cooling benefits, just aesthetics and rigidity. Though you'll find the odd mention of protection for the components on the back from things like dropped screws, abrasion, or small water cooling mishaps, which is valid, but not cooling, right? Well that's what I thought! But Aorus recently released their GTX 1080 Extreme Edition 8G, a beastly looking card with an advanced copper backplate cooling. They claim that excess heat from your GPU not only gets dissipated by the massive cooling module on the front, you know the standard graphics card heatsink dealie, but also through the backside with a ribbed copper plate providing a well-rounded thermal solution for the GPU. Well they've piqued my interest, but they don't say exactly by how much the advanced copper backplate cooling solution will actually reduce temps by. There is this giant aggro 3 that's just chilling on the graphic of the backplate, so I guess we're gonna go with that. Welcome to episode 1 of Sh** Manufacturers Say, where we're gonna test if Aorus' new solution can stand up to their bold claims. GFuel is hosting a buy one get one free promotion for their energy drink tubs. Check it out at the link below. Let's set the playing field. This is a non-reference NVIDIA GTX 1080, but we'll start with a Founders Edition 1080. It also has a backplate, but doesn't claim that it improves cooling and there's no shiny copper on it. Just a few weak sauce thermal pads that are probably there mostly to make sure that the backplate isn't detrimental to cooling. I threw it on a test bench and loaded up Furmark, the fuzzy donut of death. I left the card at stock settings other than cranking the temp target up to 83 degrees, and after letting it burn for about 20 minutes just to be sure, it was at a stable 79 degrees celsius. All right, time to take it back off the bench and remove the backplate. This is a relatively simple process. Four screws around the GPU, two bigger ones near the IO, and then there's a ton of tiny little incredibly annoying screws everywhere. Be sure to have a magnetis parts tray. If you don't have one, we have this handy guide on how to make one out of a dead hard drive because these little devils will run away on you. God, they are annoying. Anyways, bench time again. The fuzzy donut is back and the results? 79 degrees. No change whatsoever. This is starting to feel like the workshop. We even took some shots with our FLIR thermal camera to give you guys a more complete picture of what's going on, but in a nutshell, the Founder's Edition card, well, the backplate didn't really help anything. But a challenger approaches, aggressive angles, animalistic symbols, refined copper metal, and industrial styling. Same process, slot it in, lock it in place, screw it in, crank the thermal and power limit to max, overclock the core and memory by 100 megahertz each, apply the fuzzy donut, and wait 20 minutes. Results? 67 degrees. And that's at over two gigahertz on the core. This is a pretty wicked card. It's fast, it runs cool. I hit a voltage limit at that overclock, but yeah, I'm liking it so far. But how about that backplate? Well, looking at the FLIR thermal imaging, there is a cold spot right where that backplate sits, but does that translate to a difference in core temperatures? Time to find out. Remove the three random screws from the backplate, then the four ones around the GPU. Realize that there are more internally. Remove the entire heat sink on plugging all four plugs from the inside and undoing two remaining screws. Find another power connector behind the backplate for the glowing Aorus logo. Try not to break the connector when removing it as it's rather fragile. Attach the cooler again, but leave the backplate off, put it back on the bench, and conclusion time. 67 degrees. That's the result. 67 degrees is not lower than 67 degrees. 67 degrees is the same damn thing as 67 degrees. These results are not different. The FLIR footage doesn't show the cold spot anymore, but as there was no improvement, the core is not less hot. The card is not running any faster. Does the backplate look really cool? Yep. Does it cool things? Maybe. Maybe the back of the PCB, but not the GPU or anything else that is going to affect performance. It's hard with the tools that we have to say whether this is to do with poor thermal transfer through the PCB or the thick thermal pad that's on the copper plate. And the card does perform well, so we aren't saying not to buy it or anything. Just brace yourself for disappointment if you're a hardcore copper backplates for their GPU cooling abilities nerd, I guess, if that exists. Thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, and consider going down below to click on links to buy stuff or buying a shirt, which is the same as buying stuff, but the stuff could reference graphics cards that you saw in this video, so that's slightly more specific than what I said right before that. Also, watch this video, which is our video on my personal rig. There we go. That video is not up yet, but theoretically, considering it's like almost done editing, it will go up before this goes up, so hopefully that works out. See you next time.