Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition Review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

Let's start with our photo-shoot. A few pages that show the ins and outs with photos, all taken with an in-house photo-shoot of course.
 
  

The product can be spotted under product (SKU) code GV-N108TAORUS X-11GD and will start selling for roughly 829 euros, in the USA you are looking at or just over 750 USD. The card has very nice looks with that dark design and subtle LED lighting. The card is based up-on a nice matte black PCB and gets 12+2 phases and uses two power headers (8-pin) for a little more overclocking headroom. You'll notice that is the only card with an increased power limiter allowance of 150%, e.g. you can choose to increase the TDP from 250 Watt x 1.50 = 375 Watts. This can get you some more headroom for tweaking. The card has three HDMI ports (one located at the rear side) for optimal HDMI VR support nut also has DVI and three DP connectors. 

As board partners are allowed to release the 1080 Ti model cards in their own configurations you will see many versions, mostly based on customized PCB/component and the obviously mandatory different cooling solutions. The Xtreme Edition edition has nice clocks and a back-plate, all quite impressive as well. The card has default clock frequencies of 1721 MHz (boost) / 1607 (base) MHz with a slightly faster than reference clocked 11 GB GDDR5X / 11232 MHz effective data-rate on the memory. Gigabyte also has an OC mode available, which clocks 25 MHz higher but requires Gigabyte's software to be ran at all times in the background.

 
Looking at the rear side you'll be impressed as to what Gigabyte did here, a nice design back plate, Aorus LED (RGB) lit logo and of course that copper plate covering the rear side PCB GPU area. The card itself is a near triple slot solution. With only 2-way SLI available these days, the size got less important we feel, so we are cool with that. The Windforce cooling system is based on a 3x 100mm Fan system. In low-load situations the three fans do not spin. Thus up-to roughly 55~60 Degrees C, the fans won't even spin. There is a copper base plate covering the GPU, memory and VRM area which will help with overall (lower) temperatures on the entire board. The LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with the the Gigabyte RGB Fusion suite, though we haven't tried it (due to lack of time). At the backside you will see a LED activated Aorus logo and sure, a thick sturdy metal back-plate with plenty of venting spaces applied as well. 

The card will offer seven display connectors; you'll spot three DisplayPort connectors, two front side located HDMI connectors and at the rear one extra but also a DVI connector. That does mean there is little ventilation available as rear exhaust. DisplayPort is 1.2 certified and DP 1.3/1.4 Ready, enabling support for 4K displays at 120Hz, 5K displays at 60Hz, and 8K displays at 60Hz (using two cables). The card includes three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI 2.0b connector, and one dual-link DVI connector. Up to four display heads can be driven simultaneously from one card. The GTX 1080 Ti display pipeline supports HDR gaming, as well as video encoding and decoding. New to Pascal is HDR Video (4K@60 10/12b HEVC Decode), HDR Record/Stream (4K@60 10b HEVC Encode), and HDR Interface Support (DP 1.4).