Gadgetory

yeah these are pretty heavy working out like Brian from check yes hey welcome back to harbor unboxed today I have a graphics card review for you and the focus of this review will be the new horas GTX Extreme Edition leading up to the release of the GTX 980 last year gigabyte like many of Nvidia's blog partners we're cashing in on the hype gigabyte began by teasing their extreme model which is this guy here and to this day this remains one of the biggest and most exciting gtx eternity graphics cards gamers can hope to lay their hands on out of all the 1080 graphics cards i've seen today gigabytes extreme gaming is still one of my favorite and with the included higher bandwidth sli bridge in the Premium Pack sticking to of these monsters together and a single system looks pretty special recently however I've heard rumors that gigabyte were playing to release an even more extreme 1080 under their horas branding well those reports were accurate and we now have the Auris GTX 1080 extreme edition as it stands the gigabyte branding has been dropped entirely from the product name and replaced with horas so that's interesting for comparison though I do still have the GTX Today extreme gaming model on hand and that'll make it a bit easier to work out what's new or different about the extreme edition model extreme gaming extreme Edition I know it's a bit confusing it's not just the names that are similar either you'd be forgiven for mistake in these graphics cards as being the same there are however a number of subtle differences some of them are quite important as well as a few noteworthy upgrades as much as I liked the original model it did have a few issues and not all of them are caused by the graphics card itself two started a huge number of consumers who bought the original extreme gaming complained about their graphics card arriving damaged with bent or squashed fins being a big problem as well as broken fans the aluminium fan shroud was quite limiting with the graphics card weighing so much this made picking it up quite difficult this was a problem because the fans overlapped any small alignment issue here that they would hit each other the damaged heatsink fins were caused in transit the packaging simply couldn't safely accommodate this massive graphics card so it seems gigabyte has decided on a do-over and they've taken opportunity to rebrand their graphics card as an horas product but how they learned from the few mistakes they made with the extreme gaming and now that with this extreme edition well let's go find out actually before I take a closer look please note this won't be a detailed benchmark review in terms of framerate performance we aren't expecting anything new the idea behind this product at least as far as I can tell is to improve the design quality and durability of the graphics card the thermals are also meant to be improved so this is what my testing will be focused on right away things are looking good the package might be significantly smaller but inside we find a big bulky graphics card supported by cardboard chalks within an anti-static bag the bag is also held in place by an external cardboard brace as well popping the card out of the packaging we saw no evidence of any kind of damage a few fins were slightly unaligned but nothing was squashed beyond repair I have to admit at first I thought wow this is exactly the same graphics card in different packaging with a new logo however after a week side-by-side comparison it became clear the updates went beyond that the new fan shroud is even larger and now does a better job of protecting the fans the LED strip lighting on top also looks much more impressive as well flipping the graphics card over we find a very different design for this Oris model the full-length backplate has been upgraded to feature a copper finned insert along with an LED backlit Oris logo gigabyte claims that the advanced tourist cooling backplate reduces the GPU load temperature by 3 degrees by removing built-up heat on the backside of the PCB the copper plate features a 6 thermal pad on the underside which helps transfer heat away from the PCB the plate then features small raised fins which help dissipate heat by maximizing the surface area there are also a few summer pads found on the backplate which remove built-up heat from the VRMs so this time around gigabyte is are really looking to maximize the cooling potential of this massive graphics card by covering every heat source in thermal pads so then that covers all the new stuff but for those that aren't familiar with the original model here's a quick look at the rest of the features this card has to offer gigabytes windforce 3x cooling design is being used and this employs three huge 100 millimeter fans impressively though this doesn't stretch the graphics card beyond 300 millimeters as you might expect three fans of this size to do in fact it's just 208 nine millimeters long gigabyte is achieve this space-saving feat by overlapping the fans normally this would create a lot of turbulence which could reduce cooling performance and more importantly generate quite a bit more noise this has been circumvented though by using a counter rotating center fan gigabyte says this provides up to 10 percent more airflow than conventional triple fan coolers the fans themselves feature double ball bearings to ensure the extreme addition goes the distance the 3d active fan feature enables silent semi passive fans allowing gamers to enjoy game playing absolute silence when the system is under light load an LED fans stop indicator provides a user-friendly instant display on the fan status adding a bit of bling to this cooler is of course RGB lighting the LED powered X illuminates the center of the fan shroud while another LED powered Oris logo and brand name can be found on the side and this creates an awesome effects for those with case windows as mentioned earlier there is also a large LED logo on the back plate as well so gigabytes RGB game is on point here removing the cooler reveals a massive copper base that covers not just the GPU but also the gddr5 X memory chips there's also six very long six millimeter thick copper heat pipes making their way through two large arrays of aluminium fins now that we have access to the PCB what we find here is a completely reworked masterpiece that measures two hundred and sixty-seven millimeters long and 121 millimeters tall gigabyte is employed at 12 plus 2 power phases on which when compared to the n video reference design should allow the extreme edition to work at much lower temperatures and provide more stable voltage output both of which should improve overclocking and extend the life of the card gigabyte also claims to be using tight next grade chokes and capacitors for greater durability another cool feature is the aerospace-grade PCB coding which gigabyte claims protects the graphics card and all of its available components from dust insects drop screws drill shavings and abrasion probably more useful though are the moisture resistant properties which are designed to stop the card from short-circuiting or failing if you happen to have a water leak and water happens to drip onto the backside of the card or the front side if it's in an inverted case anyway the card is also backed by the extreme care four year warranty although it's not entirely clear if the warranty card water damage moving on we find dual eight pin PCI Express power connectors capable of feeding the graphics card up to 300 watts that's twice the PCI power input of the founders Edition card finally end of the PCB there are two internal HDMI connectors which connect to the extreme VR link module that said unlike the extreme gaming model the extreme edition doesn't appear to come in a premium pack which also includes the VR link module so this would have to be purchased separately those of you wanting to overclock the gtx 1080 extreme edition can turn to the horas engine software which works very well the software enables easy overclocking and allows a user to increase the thermal target as well as the power target the user can monitor the GPUs vitals and easy overclocking modes exist along with the more complex manual overclocking options voltage states can also be adjusted and custom fan curves can also be created finally the all-important RGB lighting can also be configured here and there are a few more standard effects to play with there is an OC mode which can be enabled a click of a button and this boosts the base clock to 1784 megahertz resulting in a boost clock speed of at least 1936 megahertz I skipped that step though I went straight in for the kill with some custom overclocking the call was able to accept the same eighteen hundred and thirty nine megahertz frequencies I managed with the extreme gaming version and this should see the boost clock speed stay at or above 1978 megahertz the gddr5 X memory also hit a frequency of 1382 megahertz for a transfer speed of eleven thousand and fifty eight gigabits per second of course due to the way in videos GPU boost 3.0 works we know that the card can run faster than the suggested boost clock is kept under the thermal and power targets in the case of the Extreme Edition this allowed the card to hold an operating frequency of 2.1 gigahertz after a 20-minute stress test which was most impressive please note i'm only testing the extreme edition with my custom overclock out of the box it's identical to the extreme gaming in terms of framerate performance even with the max overclock a polite if perform is very much like the extreme gaming gaining at just a single frame in our Far Cry primal test the Extreme Edition matches the extreme gaming in the doom benchmark with 77 FPS on average so not much else to say here really again we find the maximum overclock on the extreme edition match as well I was able to cheat with the extreme meaning this time when testing ARMA 3 here we see the Extreme Edition consumes roughly the same amount of power as the extreme gaming in its out-of-the-box configuration as well as overclocked finally I took a look at the operating temperatures and here I again found results that were much the same as the original extreme gaming model using the auto fan speed profile the extreme edition reach 69 degrees under full load which was actually a single degree higher than extreme gaming that said we are within the margin of error here without the overclocked attempt so much the same the fans just weren't spinning as hard that said at no point were the fans on the extreme edition audible even when overclocked to the max it was virtually silent therefore I decided to manually turn them up to 60% at this setting they were still very quiet but I could now distinguish the graphics card from the case fans when sitting a few feet from the system so while still very quiet load temps drop down with 63 degrees which is very impressive looking purely at the results there immediately isn't that much to see the Auris GTX 10-8 Extreme Edition looks to be the extreme gaming with a slightly different name and well for the most part that's kind of true that's it it really comes down to the fine details what we're looking at here is a version 2.0 if you will a more refined extreme gaming gigabyte has listened to consumers identified the weaknesses of the original version and address them with this Oris model given how much I liked the original model I was always going to be a fan of this enhanced version and well I am the new fan shroud protects the fans better and manages to look even tougher the copper inset on the back also looks nice as does the LED backlit logo in fact the LED lighting overall is much improved but I really appreciate how gigabyte hasn't just taken the opportunity to make the extreme version more flashy all those extra thermal pads are very welcomed the only issue left to address now is the price and it's kind of a big one gigabyte are offering base model gtx 1080s using their wind force coolers for just 580 dollars u.s. right now while the extreme gaming models that such as this guy here 670 US and that's a pretty huge price premium rumor has it that the extreme Edition that I have right here will be $700 u.s. and while a very nice graphics card that's a 20 something percent price premium so it might be a bit hard for enthusiasts to swallow that really is my only criticism of this new graphics card other than that I love the Auris GT X 1080 extreme edition and I desperately want to see another one of these in my test system for some SLI action I really don't think it gets much tougher than that anyway let me know what you guys think about the new horas GT X 1080 extreme edition is that something you'll consider for your next build I'm your host Steve and I hope to catch on another video really soon