[Various] 1080 Reviews

[ondooy]

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8 GB @ TechPowerup

NVIDIA's new Pascal GP104 processor, which powers the GeForce GTX 1080, is a true marvel in silicon engineering. The new card is faster than any single GPU card we've seen to date, but also includes tons of new technologies and efficiency improvements.
When looking at performance of this new powerhouse, we see twice(!) the performance than GTX 970 averaged over our test suite at 4K resolution. Compared to NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti the performance uplift is about 30%, and GTX 1080 is not even the highest end card NVIDIA will release on Pascal. Against AMD's R9 Fury X, the GTX 1080 is over 30% faster too. GTX 970 SLI, which is an excellent value proposition is also conclusively beat, and at lower pricing. This means that with one quick swoop NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 has obsoleted everything in the high-end market.

GeForce GTX 1080 comes with a new thermal solution that gives the card a more edgy look. The cooler uses two slots, comes with a nice thin backplate that doesn't block SLI airflow significantly, and can be partially removed to improve SLI airflow even more. However, its cooling performance seems largely unimproved compared to previous versions of the NVIDIA reference design. The cooler still runs above 80°C during serious gaming, which means gaming performance will be slightly reduced by Boost while keeping temperatures in check. While idle fan noise is low, the card does not include the highly popular idle-fan off feature. Also during gaming the noise levels are decent but not nearly as quiet as what we've seen on some custom GTX 980 Ti designs that have much higher heat output, too. Compared to GTX 980 with the reference cooler, which emits roughly the same heat as the GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 ends up noisier. I feel that the cooler is the weakest part of GTX 1080, which gives add-in-board partners room to improve this otherwise awesome card.

NVIDIA's new GPU is produced on a 16 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan, which means that just thanks to the process changes power efficiency will go up. But NVIDIA put in some exta work and the result is the most efficient graphics card ever made. It draws only around 180 Watts during heavy gaming, which is similar to GTX 980 - but GTX 1080 delivers much higher performance at the same time. Looking at performance per Watt it's almost like magic; GTX 1080 is nearly twice efficient as Maxwell, which also means it's twice as efficient as AMD's Fiji cards.

With Boost 3.0 NVIDIA has updated the way overclocking works. Instead of dialing in a single fixed frequency increase that is applied to every frequency that Boost picks, you can now select an individual overclock per voltage - up to 80 such levels exist, which makes overclocking much more complex. Some efforts are happening at the GPU OC tool front, but the beta version of EVGA Precision still has long ways to go before it's ready for mass consumption. I'm also having doubts about how much can be gained by the individual frequency adjustments, guess that's something for a future article. We did some OC testing and there are significant gains to be had on both GPU and memory, which translate into over 10% extra performance.

Price-wise the GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition (the card we reviewed today) clocks in at $699, which is a $100 increase over NVIDIA's MSRP of $599. That's a huge price premium, and not worth it in my opinion for a cooler that doesn't perform that great, NVIDIA confirmed that Founder's Edition cards won't come with higher-OC-potential GPUs. I suspect that this approach is NVIDIA's way to milk early adopters - in the first weeks there will be only the Founders Edition available, until board partners come out with their custom designs, which will be well after Computex. I'm also worried that this could tempt board partners to pick $699 as baseline for their custom design products and that we'll see very few if any cards at $599. All this is quite unknown though at the moment, so let's wait a bit and see what happens. AMD's upcoming Polaris is no threat to GeForce GTX 1080, because it addresses a completely different lower-performance segment. Despite the price, GTX 1080 is an awesome card at a very competitive price point if you look at price/performance of previous generations, and its performance and efficiency are in a class of its own. The card is an excellent upgrade for everyone, maybe not GTX 980 Ti owners, because you won't get much money if you sell yours now, and the performance uplift isn't that big to spend a few hundred bucks for a few percent over an overclocked custom design version. On the other hand this could be a great chance to pick up a used GTX 980 Ti at bargain prices from GTX 1080 early-adopters.

 

[ondooy]

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Video Card @ Tested

In the end, the GTX 1080 is pretty damned fast in today's generation of games, and will likely only improve over time. Most of the performance improvement in the current title crop result from the higher core and memory clocks of the GTX 1080, but features such as simultaneous multi-projection will likely make a major impact as VR titles come to the fore. Nifty toys like Ansel also make Nvidia's new card more attractive. What's surprising is just the superiority gap between the GTX 1080 and the GTX 980.

On the other hand, if you're running on mainstream hardware and don't have an infinite budget, you might wait and see how the $379 GTX 1070 performs. Titan X performance at $379 looks pretty attractive. As usual, prices will vary depending on factory overclocks – the 1080 seems to have a ton of headroom for overclocking. Should you drop $599 ($699 for Nvidia's "Founder's Edition" reference card) for a GTX 1080? What you get is essentially GTX 980 SLI performance in a single card, so that may be worth the price of admission.

 

[ondooy]

Introduction, About The GTX 1080 & Testing Notes @ TechGage

Considering the fact that NVIDIA left little to the imagination when it unveiled the GeForce GTX 1080 in Austin earlier this month, and the fact that the performance seen in our testing largely matches up with what we expected, this is one card that’s seriously easy to write a conclusion for.

There are a couple of different ways to look at the GTX 1080. NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsun gave us a great example during his keynote a few weeks ago: It’s faster than a TITAN X, uses less power, and is cheaper. Through our testing, we’ve been able to establish that those promises were true. Is the card faster than 980s in SLI, though? The answer to that is “sometimes”. If a game takes proper, full advantage of SLI, it’ll likely be a bit faster than a GTX 1080, but not by much. In some cases, the GTX 1080 even wins if SLI is taken advantage of.

As much as NVIDIA likes to talk about the TITAN X in its Pascal comparisons, I think a fairer comparison is the 980 Ti, as that’s the card most people own (out of the two).

The GTX 1080 is at least 25% faster than the TITAN X, so that means it’d be at least 35% faster than a 980 Ti. That card cost $649 a few weeks ago, so with the 1080, NVIDIA delivers a card that’s much faster, still cheaper (SRP $599), and uses far less power. The same applies to the GTX 980; two of those right now would cost more than the GTX 1080, and while it might be faster (in some cases), it’s a much bulkier setup that delivers a much-decreased performance-per-watt rating versus the 1080.

Any way you look at it, the GTX 1080 delivers just what we hoped Maxwell’s successor would. It is unfortunate that we didn’t get all of the candy that comes with full-blown Pascal, like NVLink and HBM2 memory, but thanks to its transition to 14nm FinFET, NVIDIA has proven that the actual need for HBM2 right now is not that great. Although, AMD could punch a hole in this theory if its first Polaris cards do in fact ship with HBM2, and with larger than a 4GB framebuffer.

Outside of boosted performance, NVIDIA introduced a number of cool technologies with Pascal, including Async Compute, multi-GPU support in Windows 10, a collection of comprehensive VR improvements, multi-monitor gaming improvements, and has updated existing ones, like GPU Boost. It’s even improved the overclocking aspect, giving those who want to push their card more dials to play around with.

After taking a look at our performance results, and poring over all that Pascal brings to the table, the GTX 1080 earns, without hesitation, one of our Editor’s Choice awards.

There is one thing I will admit, though. Based on what’s been revealed, I feel like the GTX 1070 is going to be the even more exciting release of the two, as it’s pretty affordable (at $379 SRP), and looks to surpass the performance of the TITAN X (it’s spec’d at 400 GFLOPs higher). The 1070 still only makes use of GDDR5, rather than the new G5X, but since the TITAN X also used GDDR5, this isn’t too much of a concern.

Now consider this: A $600 GTX 1080 is going to deliver 9 TFLOPs of performance, whereas dual GTX 1070s would gain 44% theoretical performance for just $160 more. Of course, if money is of little concern, you’re also free to go the 1080 SLI route to gain 38% over SLI’d 1070s. It’s nice to have choices!

As mentioned earlier, this launch article will not conclude our GTX 1080 coverage. We have more stuff planned, although some of that might wait until the GTX 1070 drops so as to kill two birds with one stone. In the near-term, though, you can expect a look at GTX 1080 overclocking, so keep your eyes peeled.

 

[ondooy]

 

[ondooy]

haaaaaaaaaah, 67 degrees under full load my ass... lolol

 

[Op_Valkyrie]

haaaaaaaaaah, 67 degrees under full load my ass... lolol

They will show during December time lah.....






































Cos by then winter ambience temp lower

 

[royfrosty]

Lol 80deg sia. In SG die already. 84deg. Thermal limit hahaha.

 

[hengheng220]

and they always say amd produces hot card.

 

[watzup_ken]

To be honest, for the price and the card it is replacing, its a pretty good value card. However, I wonder if the Founders edition is something that they will be only selling for the time being cause if that is the case, then it is clearly a way for Nvidia to make more money from the people that cannot wait.

Anyway, I am surprise at the temps to be honest. I have not read a review out there, but it will be interesting to monitor if the temps are that high across the reviews and to see if it is something that could be due to a BIOS issue affecting fan speed.

 

[watzup_ken]

and they always say amd produces hot card.

I don't deny the fact that AMD cards tend to run hotter and more power hungry, especially of late. Having said that, I think AMD did not scrimp on their compute performance thus and A sync features, which I think is a positive.

 

[Gattberserk]

Lol 80deg sia. In SG die already. 84deg. Thermal limit hahaha.

Oh well, the GP100 will be a furnace. Its a GTX 480 in disguise, and Nvidia is still restricting its Titans to the "founder" edition.


I think GTX 1170 would be a better buy with updated GP104 or possible GP204 with similar SM:CUDA ratio of GP100, higher speed, faster G5X and better thermal / power envelop. Maybe even add in some real HW based ACE? All for a price of US$350-400

Its all dream though till AMD really challenges Nvidia.


But in that case, Q3 2017 with GTX 1170 is definitely a better buy.

 

[samloi]

To be honest, for the price and the card it is replacing, its a pretty good value card. However, I wonder if the Founders edition is something that they will be only selling for the time being cause if that is the case, then it is clearly a way for Nvidia to make more money from the people that cannot wait.

Anyway, I am surprise at the temps to be honest. I have not read a review out there, but it will be interesting to monitor if the temps are that high across the reviews and to see if it is something that could be due to a BIOS issue affecting fan speed.

The founder's edition is available througout the production of this generation of cards.

 

[royfrosty]

I think a much wiser choice is to get an AIB cooler attached ba.

Better cooling with US$100 off the MSRP. Which translate could be SGD$200 cheaper after all the mark up and all.

Unless for some reason, some really need a blower card for ITX.

 

[Gattberserk]

I think a much wiser choice is to get an AIB cooler attached ba.

Better cooling with US$100 off the MSRP. Which translate could be SGD$200 cheaper after all the mark up and all.

Unless for some reason, some really need a blower card for ITX.

TBH, it will be hard to expect AiB provide better cooler, more robust VR etc on the card and expect it to retail below the reference. In any case, the reference will jack up the price of many high end custom 1080.


G1 gaming is already at $720 which is already higher than founder edition.

 

[Elijahonli]

not sure whats with all the hate and flack about the temp.... different test environment and ur expect it to be the same ? prev gen cards also get 80+ degree also what

 

[samloi]

I think a much wiser choice is to get an AIB cooler attached ba.

Better cooling with US$100 off the MSRP. Which translate could be SGD$200 cheaper after all the mark up and all.

Unless for some reason, some really need a blower card for ITX.

like me. building a itx rig. Thought should be cheaper skali more expensive

 

[ondooy]

faster than 980 SLI....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VipvF26XRNY&feature=youtu.be&t=12m43s

 

[royfrosty]

not sure whats with all the hate and flack about the temp.... different test environment and ur expect it to be the same ? prev gen cards also get 80+ degree also what

You draw lesser power, in fact much lesser. You reduce the amount of cuda cores, but you increased the core clocked.

You reduce the GDDR5 to GDDRX which it should reduced heat output to.

But it is not.....

Previous gen to run at 80degC is still understandable as the 980ti draws a range of 300watts.

And worse of all $100US more for a cooler that cant cool the 1080 properly. Where the AIB are gonna market it at $600US.

 

[ondooy]

 

[ondooy]