Gadgetory

it's been a crazy few months in the tech world Nvidia first announced that GeForce GTX 1080 at the beginning of May at a press day in Austin Texas ten days later the embargo was lifted and reviewers such as myself could release our results a further 10 days down the track the 1080 became publicly available on May 27th and sold out shortly after the initial release however was for the founders Edition which is essentially a grossly of a price reference card the partner board models woulda come at a later date though the exact date hasn't been made clear historically AMD and videos partners do a much better job of building a graphics card around the GPU we expect things to be no different this time despite in videos bold claims that the fans Edition will be the best 1080 to hit the market I'm pretty sure a board Pi thank you goodbye might have something to say about that and well in a way they have by responding with the GeForce GTX 1080 g1 gaming graphics card and we'll take a look at this beauty today so first what makes the 1080 g1 gaming so special well gone is the dreaded louis-style cooler and replacing it as gigabytes windforce 3x cooler with blade design fans larger heatsink has been complemented with three copper heat pipes featuring a direct touch design which means the copper pipes come in direct contact with a GPU surface these aren't just any old heat pipes either gigabyte says the composite heat pipes to combine both thermal conductivity and phase transition which improves heat transfer between two solid interfaces improving the cooling capacity by 29% the heatsink uses the tried-and-true gigabyte triangle cool technology which combines the fins with an aluminium clip module which further enhances heat dissipation giving the g1 gaming cooler bit of bling is yep you guessed it RGB lighting what do you think it needs that are not gamers can enjoy 16.8 million customizable color lighting which can be adjusted using the extreme engine utility which I'll check out shortly sadly with the g1 gaming no major changes have been made to the PCB so we're still limited to a single 8 pin PCI Express power connector the g1 gaming is gigabytes mainstream GC X 1080 offering the more extreme version will be known as the extreme gaming model and will feature dual 8 pin PCIe connectors and a redesigned PCB the g1 gaming is the that we can expect to hit that $600 MSRP at some point while the extreme gaming likely be priced closer to the founders Edition $700 MSRP still while the g1 gaming isn't gigabytes amidst extreme offering it is far from sedate and despite the same power input configuration the PCB has been reworked and upgraded gone is the five plus one phase power design of the founders edition we now have an 8 + 2 phase power design for better load balancing which will improve stability and lower temperatures particularly went overclocked included in the packaging of the highest grade chokes and capacitors which is all part of gigabytes ultra durable materials on the backside of the g1 gaming you'll find a full-length backplate protecting the card and the sleek design also looks very cool giving a clean look another important performance characteristic at the factory overclocked core memory clock speeds gigabyte provides two operating modes which are called gaming mode and OC mode the Nvidia reference speed calls for a core clock speed of 1607 megahertz and gigabyte has increased this by 5% to 1695 megahertz allowing for a boost clock of 1835 megahertz the OC mode takes things further providing a 7 percent overclock with the base clock of 1721 megahertz and a boost clock of 1860 megahertz of course using gigabytes extreme engine we're going to try and push things even further finally around the i/o end of the graphics card we find a dueling DVI port an HDMI 2.0 B port and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports it is possible to drive a single 8k display using a pair of display ports you know just in case you have an 8k panel lying around so while you pondered that let's get back into the benchmarks first up we're taking a look at the results in ARMA 3 at 1440p here you can see the gaming mode netted us basically the same performance as the founders Edition OC mode delivered a tiny amount of extra performance and a maximum overclock barely PIPP the fans Edition overclocked by a single frame 4k told the same story here OC mode was able to grab a single extra frame as did a custom overclock which gave us 44 frames on average and the exact same performance as the founders Edition card the bigger numbers in battlefield resulted in slightly bigger frame margins between the cards gaming mode was again identical to the founders Edition card OC mode gained 3 FPS and our custom overclock was able to net 40 more FPS giving the card a 2 fps we and over the overclocked reference card the performance trend was the same at 4k but this time OC mode only netted us one extra frame our custom overclock allowed the gigabyte card to make 63 FPS for a single frame victory over the founders Edition okay so you guys are starting to get the idea the division tells us the exact same story and I'm not going to bore the hell out of you by saying the same thing over and over I'll show you the 4k results next followed by the performance in Doom Just Cause 3 Far Cry primal and Star Wars Battlefront you'll see in each game that the maximum overclock is as good as even with the founders addition overclock and the difference between the stock clock founders versus the g1 game is gaming mode and OC mode is pretty much negligible the custom overclock results are no doubt a bit disappointing as the g1 gaming is really no faster than the overclock founders Edition card despite running at least 10 degrees cooler in all of our tests the gigabytes g1 gaming 1080 didn't allow for any more of a clocking headroom pushing the g1 gaming further caused artifacts and eventual crashing despite temperatures staying in check given what I found with the g1 gaming I really questioned if those extreme vrm cards will be able to push the 1080 core much higher something else worth pointing out is the fact that although at g1 gaming base clock is higher than what we were able to achieve with a Founders Edition graphics card the resulting performance was much the same this is due to the boost clock which was throttled down below 2 gigahertz after 10 minutes of gaming despite temperatures never exceeding 74 degrees Celsius the average operating frequency was 1949 megahertz and this did cause the g1 games fan spin up to an audible 2,300 rpm while it wasn't loud it was comparable to the founders Edition operating at around 40 to 50% fan speed out of the box the power consumption is a couple of what's higher than the standard 1080 so I focused on my custom overclock to give you guys an idea for the maximum draw you're going to see from this card you can see on this graph that at most our average total system consumption was 292 watts 26 watts higher than what we saw from the stock clock reference card this isn't huge and really comes down to the fact that we weren't really able to overclock the card significantly ok so admittedly that wasn't as impressive or as exciting as I'd hoped that said I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting so let's try and put all this into perspective compared to the fans Edition 1080 the g1 gaming runs cooler quite a bit cooler so that's a huge plus the card does however dissipate heat directly into the case for the card to outperform the fans edition you need to ensure you have a decent case cool you set up the operating volume while quiet isn't significantly better than the fans edition in my opinion if anything I think in video are too focused on the operating volume of the bounds edition when set to auto the fan barely spins up on my card at all the gigabyte extreme engine is a very nice utility and I'd happily use this over a popular alternative such as MSI Afterburner out of the box the g1 gaming is faster than the founders Edition though the margins weren't exactly significant still you are getting more performance and no extra cost in fact as it stands the g1 gaming 1080 is $50 cheaper in both the US and Australia when compared to the founders Edition at 650 us the g1 gaming isn't yet selling for the advertised $600 u.s. MSRP but with limited stock it'll probably be a few weeks or even months before we see $600 gtx 1080 is available overall the gigabyte geforce gtx 1080 g1 gaming is a very nice graphics card that takes in videos current flagship GPU and pairs it with a better performing cooler while offering a little extra performance out of the box it isn't world better than the fans edition like many of us had hoped but this isn't gigabytes fault and it seems like there simply isn't a headroom for those rumored 2.2 to 2.4 gigahertz overclocks gigabyte does have a more extreme model capable of feeding the GPU even more power so I'll definitely be keen to see if that model takes things to the next level what do you guys think of the gaming g1 let me know in the comments and hit subscribe if you haven't yet to get coverage of all the upcoming new gen graphics cards I'm your host Matt as always and I'll see you guys next time YouTube